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'Fix' a typescript file created by the 'script' program to remove control characters
attribution: Thanks to repellent on perlmonks.org source: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=684459

Create a thumbnail from a video file

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"

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Find C/C++ source code comments
This is a naive way of finding source code comments in source code files that use C-like comments: // and /*...*/

Compression formats Benchmark
See: http://imgur.com/JgjK2.png for example. Do some serious benchmarking from the commandline. This will write to a file with the time it took to compress n bytes to the file (increasing by 1). Run: $ gnuplot -persist

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"

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.

find broken symbolic links
== remove broken links == find -L . -type l -exec rm -rf {} \; == how this work == "symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, unless the symbolic link is broken. If you want to search for symbolic links when -L is in effect, use -xtype." -- manpage of find.

Convert Unix newlines to DOS newlines
The ctrl+v,ctrl+m portion represents key presses that you should do. If you do it successfully you should see a ^M character appear.


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