Placing little scripts in your ~/bin directory makes it abundantly clear why some people love shell scripting, and some jobs require shelll scripting as a skill. It seriously improves the speed and ease of life. Here are a few that I enjoy:

Crashplan

Because I sometimes need to micromanage my backup software and the software doesn’t function if I try linking it to another folder this simplifies things.

#!/bin/bash
# file: /~/bin/crash   
CRASHPLAN_DIR=/usr/local/crashplan/bin

cd $CRASHPLAN_DIR;
sudo ./CrashPlanEngine $1
cd -

imgup

I have a single destination for my image files, so I use a script to make the already-passwordless SCP even easier.

#!/bin/bash
# file: /~/bin/imgup
scp $1 <USERNAME@SERVER>:<SERVER_TARGET_PATH>