Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages. For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac: curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '<entry>' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' | perl -pe 's/^<title>(.*)<\/title>.*<name>(.*)<\/name>.*$/$2 - $1/' If you want to see the name of the last person, who added a message to the conversation, change the greediness of the operators like this: curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '<entry>' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' | perl -pe 's/^<title>(.*)<\/title>.*?<name>(.*?)<\/name>.*$/$2 - $1/' Show Sample Output

In this case it's better do to use the dedicated tool

recursively traverse the directory structure from . down, look for string "oldstring" in all files, and replace it with "newstring", wherever found also: grep -rl oldstring . |xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/oldstring/newstring'

Yeah I know it's been up here a million times, but this service is a really clean and nice one. Nothing but your IP address on it. Actually I was to write something like this, and noticed this on appspot... ;) Show Sample Output

If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command. # creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com' # /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10 # create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g' <<< $PWD`.tgz) . # tar -czf /home/gpl/.backups/04-22-10-01:13-#home#gpl#.rr#src.tgz . I personally find myself having to reference date --help quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner. Here's the old version: alias dateh='date --help|sed "/^ *%%/,/^ *%Z/!d;s/ \+/ /g"|while read l;do date "+ %${l/% */}_${l/% */}_${l#* }";done|column -s_ -t' This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ] Show Sample Output

Delete a range of line

This command find all files in the current dir and subdirs, and replace all occurances of "oldstring" in every file with "newstring".

Use the following variation for FreeBSD: openssl rand 6 | xxd -p | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/:$//'

echo "http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com" | sed -e's/%\([0-9A-F][0-9A-F]\)/\\\\\x\1/g' | xargs echo -e http://www.google.com Works under bash on linux. just alter the '-e' option to its corresponding equivalence in your system to execute escape characters correctly.

This one uses dictionary.com

Though without infinite time and knowledge of how the site will be designed in the future this may stop working, it still will serve as a simple straight forward starting point. This uses the observation that the only item marked as strong on the page is the single logical line that includes the italicized fact. If future revisions of the page show failure, or intermittent failure, one may simply alter the above to read. wget randomfunfacts.com -O - 2>/dev/null | tee lastfact | grep \<strong\> | sed "s;^.*<i>\(.*\)</i>.*$;\1;" The file lastfact, can then be examined whenever the command fails.

Prints the 4th line and then quits. (Credit goes to flatcap in comments: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6031/print-just-line-4-from-a-textfile#comment.)

The -i option in sed allows in-place editing of the input file. Replace myexpression with any regular expression. /expr/d syntax means if the expression matches then delete the line. You can reverse the functionality to keep matching lines only by using: sed -i -n '/myexpression/p' /path/to/file.txt

seq -s ' ' 1 9 | sed -n ':a;p;s/ *\w$//;h;/^$/t;b a;q' | tac | awk '{for(i=1;i 1x1=1 1x2=2 2x2=4 1x3=3 2x3=6 3x3=9 1x4=4 2x4=8 3x4=12 4x4=16 1x5=5 2x5=10 3x5=15 4x5=20 5x5=25 1x6=6 2x6=12 3x6=18 4x6=24 5x6=30 6x6=36 1x7=7 2x7=14 3x7=21 4x7=28 5x7=35 6x7=42 7x7=49 1x8=8 2x8=16 3x8=24 4x8=32 5x8=40 6x8=48 7x8=56 8x8=64 1x9=9 2x9=18 3x9=27 4x9=36 5x9=45 6x9=54 7x9=63 8x9=72 9x9=81

I needed a way to search all files in a web directory that contained a certain string, and replace that string with another string. In the example, I am searching for "askapache" and replacing that string with "htaccess". I wanted this to happen as a cron job, and it was important that this happened as fast as possible while at the same time not hogging the CPU since the machine is a server. So this script uses the nice command to run the sh shell with the command, which makes the whole thing run with priority 19, meaning it won't hog CPU processing. And the -P5 option to the xargs command means it will run 5 separate grep and sed processes simultaneously, so this is much much faster than running a single grep or sed. You may want to do -P0 which is unlimited if you aren't worried about too many processes or if you don't have to deal with process killers in the bg. Also, the -m1 command to grep means stop grepping this file for matches after the first match, which also saves time. Show Sample Output

Not my script. Belongs to mathewbauer. Used without his permission. This script gives a single line as shown in the sample output. NOTE: I have blanked out the IP address for obvious security reasons. But you will get whatever is your IP if you run the script. Tested working in bash. Show Sample Output

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4455706 Show Sample Output

Show Sample Output

Having to escape forwardslashes when using sed can be a pain. However, it's possible to instead of using / as the separator to use : . I found this by trying to substitute $PWD into my pattern, like so sed "s/~.*/$PWD/" file.txt Of course, $PWD will expand to a character string that begins with a / , which will make sed spit out an error such as "sed: -e expression #1, char 8: unknown option to `s'". So simply changing it to sed "s:~.*:$PWD:" file.txt did the trick. Show Sample Output

I often need to extract a function from a bash script and this command will do it. Show Sample Output