Add a Separator Between Terminal Commands

After running many commands in the terminal, it sometime gets difficult to read the outputs. I've seen many people hitting 'Enter' repeatedly just to separate those outputs. This neat trick would add a nice separator between each command and also makes the command bold. In addition to that it also adds a time-stamp at the end. The time-stamp is useful in knowing when a particular long-running command completed.

So the final result would look like this.

Easily Enable/Disable SVN Proxy

To configure SVN proxy settings you need to edit the servers file in svn. In Linux, this can be found at ~/.subversion/servers.

Open this file in a text editor and change the settings as following by including the proxy host and port under the [global] section. Uncomment those two lines and remove any leading spaces.

[global]
# http-proxy-exceptions = *.exception.com, www.internal-site.org
http-proxy-host = proxy.host.com
http-proxy-port = 1234
# http-proxy-username = defaultusername
# http-proxy-password = defaultpassword
# http-compression = no
# http-auth-types = basic;digest;negotiate
# No http-timeout, so just use the builtin default.
# No neon-debug-mask, so neon debugging is disabled.
# ssl-authority-files = /path/to/CAcert.pem;/path/to/CAcert2.pem

If you get any errors, make sure that there are no spaces at the start of those lines.

For most of us, proxy is used only at school/university/work. Everywhere else you don't use proxy. So Most of the time you need configure the settings once. But you will have to enable/disable proxy every time. That means opening this file in an editor and commenting/uncommenting manually every single time.

After getting fed up with doing this every time I move to and from university, I came up with a better way to do this.

Adding Custom Commands to the Equinox OSGi Console

Equinox is a very popular, widely used implementation of the OSGi framework. The command line console of Equinox can be accessed by running with the "-console" option.
You can run the equinox jar file with the console enabled as follows.

java -jar org.eclipse.osgi_3.6.2.R36x_v20110210.jar -console

Or you can also access the OSGi console of your Eclipse installation. Go to the folder where Eclipse is installed and run the following command.

./eclipse -console

if you type "help" command in the prompt you get, you will see a list of available commands and what they do. I am going to show you how to add your own command  to the console.