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floating point operations in shell scripts
allows you to use floating point operations in shell scripts

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
This command find all files in the current dir and subdirs, and replace all occurances of "oldstring" in every file with "newstring".

Batch Convert SVG to PNG (in parallel)
Convert some SVG files into PNG using ImageMagick's convert command. Run the conversions in parallel to save time. This is safer than robinro's forkbomb approach :-) xargs runs four processes at a time -P4

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

urldecode with AWK
Fast and simple awk urldecoder! Note: Parameter -n is specific to GNU awk

Start a SOCKS proxy to avoid a restrictive firewall
You may go to Internet by means of your home ssh server. You must configure your local proxy to send traffic through the proxy. Many programs allows that: firefox, pidgin, skype, gnome, etc. Your home ssh server must listen in any of the ports permitted by your enterprise firewall. That usually includes 80 and 443.

Send multiple attachments using mailx
If you're users have ever asked your script to email their reports in separate attachments instead of tar'ring them into one file, then you can use this. You'll need the mailx package of course. In Unix you'd want to add an additional parameter "-m" (uuencode foo.txt foo.txt; uuencode /etc/passwd passwd.txt)|mailx -m -s "Hooosa!" someone@cmdfu.com

Stream your desktop to a remote machine.
This allows you to stream your desktop using vlc to another computer, in this case, 192.168.1.2 on your local network. If you have vlc installed, your all set to try this out. To view your own desktop, just run "vlc screen://" For more info, see http://nerdlogger.com/2008/01/08/stream-your-linuxwindowsmac-desktop-as-video-using-vlc/

Get the full path to a file
Part of coreutils - so needs no extra package...

View the current number of free/used inodes in a file system
tune2fs also provides the same information . But the information does not give the current usage , it gives the information when the file system was last mounted. http://www.zaman4linux.in/2010/10/using-up-all-the-free-inodes.html


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