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Draw a Sierpinski triangle
OK, not the most useful but a good way to impress friends. Requires the "display" command from ImageMagick.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

MSDOS command to check existance of command and exit batch if failed
This is a command to be used inside of MS-DOS batch files to check existence of commands as preconditions before actual batch processing can be started. If the command is found, batch script continues execution. If not, a message is printed on screen, script then waits for user pressing a key and exits. An error message of the command itself is suppressed for clarity purpose.

Copy a folder with progress with pv

exclude a column with cut
Show all columns except 5th. This might help you save some typing if you are trying to exclude some columns from the output.

Last month
Work out last months value

cycle through everything sox knows how to read, playing only the first three seconds
I wasted two hours reading the sox documentation and searching on the web for the format of some obscure fscking sound sample, and then finally came up with this. This plays only the first three seconds of your unknown formatted sound file using every one of sox's built-in filetypes. If you don't get an exact match, you may get close. . I could not fit every single type in and keep it under 127 characters, so you will have to replace "..." with the full list obtainable by `$ sox --help` (or try `Show sample output`) . note: /usr/bin/play should be linked to sox on most systems.

Keep track of diff progress
You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. $ find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular.

Create full backups of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Problem: I wanted to backup user data individually. In this example, all user data is located in "/mnt/storage/profiles", and about 25 folders inside, each with a username ( /mnt/storage/profiles/mike; /mnt/storage/profiles/lucy ...) I need each individual folder backed up, not the whole "/mnt/storage/profiles". So, using find while excluding directories depth and creating two variables (tarfile=username & desdir=destination), tar will create a .tgz file for each folder, resulting in a "mike_full.tgz" and "lucy_full.tgz".

Display HTTP-header using curl


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