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

Displays an animated hourglass for x amount of seconds Show Sample Output

Allow to launch nc like a daemon, in background until you still stop it. You can stop it with kill %1 (jobs method) or kill PID. The -k option can force nc to listen another connection, but if you use redirection, it will work only one time. The loop's inside doesn't do anything, but we can imagine to send a message to screen when a connection is established Show Sample Output

Obviously, you can replace 'man' command with any command in this command line to do useful things. I just want to mention that there is a way to list all the commands which you can execute directly without giving fullpath. Normally all important commands will be placed in your PATH directories. This commandline uses that variable to get commands. Works in Ubuntu, will work in all 'manpage' configured *nix systems. Show Sample Output

This is a more accurate way to watch the progress of a dd process. The $DDPID=$! is needed so that you don't get the PID of the sleep. The sleep 1 is needed because in my testing at least, if you run kill -USR1 against dd too quickly, it will kill it off instead of display the status. So you need to wait a second, probably so that it can configure itself to trap the USR1 signal. Show Sample Output

There is a common command for outputting a field or list of fields from each line in a file. Why wouldn't you just use cut?

Based on the MrMerry one, just add some visuals to differentiate files and directories

Referring to the original post, if you are using $! then that means the process is a child of the current shell, so you can just use `wait $!`. If you are trying to wait for a process created outside of the current shell, then the loop on `kill -0 $PID` is good; although, you can't get the exit status of the process.

This shows every bit of information that stat can get for any file, dir, fifo, etc. It's great because it also shows the format and explains it for each format option. If you just want stat help, create this handy alias 'stath' to display all format options with explanations. alias stath="stat --h|sed '/Th/,/NO/!d;/%/!d'" To display on 2 lines: ( F=/etc/screenrc N=c IFS=$'\n'; for L in $(sed 's/%Z./%Z\n/'<<<`stat --h|sed -n '/^ *%/s/^ *%\(.\).*$/\1:%\1/p'`); do G=$(echo "stat -$N '$L' \"$F\""); eval $G; N=fc;done; ) For a similarly powerful stat-like function optimized for pretty output (and can sort by any field), check out the "lll" function http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/5815/advanced-ls-output-using-find-for-formattedsortable-file-stat-info From my .bash_profile -> http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

This loop will finish if a file hasn't changed in the last 10 seconds. . It checks the file's modification timestamp against the clock. If 10 seconds have elapsed without any change to the file, then the loop ends. . This script will give a false positive if there's a 10 second delay between updates, e.g. due to network congestion . How does it work? 'date +%s' gives the current time in seconds 'stat -c %Y' gives the file's last modification time in seconds '$(( ))' is bash's way of doing maths '[ X -lt 10 ]' tests the result is Less Than 10 otherwise sleep for 1 second and repeat . Note: Clever as this script is, inotify is smarter. Show Sample Output

This one-liner fills the screen with randomly colored lines.

Based on the MrMerry one, just add some visuals and sort directory and files

This provides a way to sort output based on the length of the line, so that shorter lines appear before longer lines. It's an addon to the sort that I've wanted for years, sometimes it's very useful. Taken from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

This is a command template for achiving the following: * loop over files --> find -name "" | while read file; do ...; done * output progress --> echo -n . * execute some command on each file and save output for later usage --> output=$() * if command failed, open subshell and echo newline --> || (echo;...;...;) * echo output of command --> echo "$output" Show Sample Output

While going through the source code for the well known ps command, I read about some interesting things.. Namely, that there are a bunch of different fields that ps can try and enumerate for you. These are fields I was not able to find in the man pages, documentation, only in the source. Here is a longer function that goes through each of the formats recognized by the ps on your machine, executes it, and then prompts you whether you would like to add it or not. Adding it simply adds it to an array that is then printed when you ctrl-c or at the end of the function run. This lets you save your favorite ones and then see the command to put in your .bash_profile like mine at : http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Note that I had to do the exec method below in order to pause with read. t () { local r l a P f=/tmp/ps c='command ps wwo pid:6,user:8,vsize:8,comm:20' IFS=' '; trap 'exec 66 exec 66 $f && command ps L | tr -s ' ' >&$f; while read -u66 l >&/dev/null; do a=${l/% */}; $c,$a k -${a//%/} -A; yn "Add $a" && P[$SECONDS]=$a; done } Show Sample Output

The above is an example of grabbing only the first column. You can define the start and end points specifically by chacater position using the following command: while read l; do echo ${l:10:40}; done < three-column-list.txt > column-c10-c40.txt Of course, it doesn't have to be a column, or extraction, it can be replacement while read l; do echo ${l/foo/bar}; done < list-with-foo.txt > list-with-bar.txt Read more about parameter expansion here: http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/pe Think of this as an alternative to awk or sed for file operations

`while true`: do forever `nc -l -p 4300 -c 'echo hello'`: this is the but anything can go here really `test $? -gt 0 && break`: this checks the return code for ctrl^c or the like and quite the loop, otherwise in order to kill the loop you'd have to get the parent process id and kill it. Show Sample Output

This snippet allows to process the output of any bash command line by line.

This will email user@example.com a message with the body: "rsync done" when there are no processes of rsync running. This can be changed for other uses by changing $(pgrep rsync) to something else, and echo "rsync done" | mailx user@example.com to another command.

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If you really _must_ use a loop, this is better than parsing the output of 'ps': PID=$! ;while kill -0 $PID &>/dev/null; do sleep 1; done kill -0 $PID returns 0 if the process still exists; otherwise 1

At times I find that I need to loop through a file where each value that I need to do something with is not on a separate line, but rather separated with a ":" or a ";". In this instance, I create a loop within which I define 'IFS' to be something other than a whitespace character. In this example, I iterate through a file which only has one line, and several fields separated with ":". The counter helps me define how many times I want to repeat the loop.

If you're very busy and don't want to wait for a ping response, use it. This command will be waiting for a successful ping response, to play a sound file to warn you that the target host is available.