I often need to add a timestamp to a file, but I never seem to remember the exact format string that has to be passed to the date command to get a compact datetime string like 20090220T231410 (i.e yyyymmddThhmmss, the ISO 8601 format popular outside the US)

Run the alias command, then issue $ps aux | tail and resize your terminal window (putty/console/hyperterm/xterm/etc) then issue the same command and you'll understand. $ ${LINES:-`tput lines 2>/dev/null||echo -n 12`} Insructs the shell that if LINES is not set or null to use the output from `tput lines` ( ncurses based terminal access ) to get the number of lines in your terminal. But furthermore, in case that doesn't work either, it will default to using the default of 80. The default for TAIL is to output the last 10 lines, this alias changes the default to output the last x lines instead, where x is the number of lines currently displayed on your terminal - 7. The -7 is there so that the top line displayed is the command you ran that used TAIL, ie the prompt. Depending on whether your PS1 and/or PROMPT_COMMAND output more than 1 line (mine is 3) you will want to increase from -2. So with my prompt being the following, I need -7, or - 5 if I only want to display the commandline at the top. ( http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash-power-prompt.html ) 275MB/748MB [7995:7993 - 0:186] 06:26:49 Thu Apr 08 [[email protected]:/dev/pts/0 +1] ~ $ In most shells the LINES variable is created automatically at login and updated when the terminal is resized (28 linux, 23/20 others for SIGWINCH) to contain the number of vertical lines that can fit in your terminal window. Because the alias doesn't hard-code the current LINES but relys on the $LINES variable, this is a dynamic alias that will always work on a tty device.

Fix a microdvd (.sub) subtitle timing by making the phrases to appear 600 frames earlier.

Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

This will backup the _contents_ of /media/SOURCE to /media/TARGET where TARGET is formatted with ntfs. The --modify-window lets rsync ignore the less accurate timestamps of NTFS.

you can just use one awk script to parse the rss feed. No need to pipe so many awk's and sed's. Its ugly and inefficient.

i want to count how many regex code i have used in vim in a long time so i make a directory in svn host and post record to this directory of course i dont want to post manually so i worte a script to do that and this is the core thing to do

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