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cd into another dir to run a one-liner, but implicitly drop back to your $OLD_PWD after
Obviously the example given is necessarily simple, but this command not only saves time on the command line (saves you using "cd -" or, worse, having to type a fully qualified path if your command cd's more than once), but is vital in scripts, where I've found the behaviour of "cd -" to be a little broken at times.

permanently let grep colorize its output
This will create a permanent alias to colorize the search pattern in your grep output

list files recursively by size

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

list files recursively by size

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

pimp text output e.g. "Linux rocks!" to look nice

renice by name

Repeat a portrait eight times so it can be cut out from a 6"x4" photo and used for visa or passport photos
Yes, You could do it in the GIMP or even use Inkscape to auto-align the clones, but the command line is so much easier. NOTE: The +clone and -clone options are just to shorten the command line instead of typing the same filename eight times. It might also speed up the montage by only processing the image once, but I'm not sure. "+clone" duplicates the previous image, the following two "-clone"s duplicate the first two and then the first four images. NOTE2: The -frame option is just so that I have some lines to cut along. BUG: I haven't bothered to calculate the exact geometry (width and height) of each image since that was not critical for the visa photos I need. If it matters for you, it should be easy enough to set using the -geometry flag near the end of the command. For example, if you have your DPI set to 600, you could use "-geometry 800x1200!" to make each subimage 1⅓ x 2 inches. You may want to use ImageMagick's "-density 600" option to put a flag in the JPEG file cuing the printer that it is a 600 DPI image. BUG2: ImageMagick does not autorotate images based on the EXIF information. Since the portrait photo was taken with the camera sideways, I made the JPEG rotate using jhead like so: jhead -autorot 2007-08-25-3685.jpg

Get current Xorg resolution via xrandr
Not sure if it works the same on any shell.


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