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Group OR'd commands where you expect only one to work
Something to stuff in an alias when you are working in multiple environments. The double-pipe OR will fall through until one of the commands succeeds, and the rest won't be executed. Any STDERR will fall out, but the STDOUT from the correct command will bubble out of the parenthesis to the less command, or some other command you specify.

Remove Thumbs.db files from folders
An alternative which uses the advanced zsh globbing (pattern matching)

list files in mtime order
Simple but useful; list files in the current directory in mtime order. Useful if you've been working on something and then take a day or two off.

Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes.
works best in a shell script run at startup. It will ping localhost once and output to null, after it does that, acpi is called for temperature in fahrenheit and piped through to another loop that feeds notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

send file to remote machine and unzip using ssh
This version transfers gzipped data which is unzipped as it arrives at the remote host.

Create a bunch of dummy text files
Using the 'time' command, running this with 'tr' took 28 seconds (and change) each time but using base64 only took 8 seconds (and change). If the file doesn't have to be viewable, pulling straight from urandom with head only took 6 seconds (and change)

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Synchronize date and time with a server over ssh
Set Remote Server Date using Local Server Time (push)

prints line numbers


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