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get xclip to own the clipboard contents
"Copying" things to the X clipboard doesn't normally create a copy. Rather the data to be 'copied' is referenced. This means that if the application that you 'copied' stuff from is closed, that data is lost. If the application that you 'copied' from is suspended with CTRL-Z, there could be some issues if you try to paste it into something. This command will create a copy of referenced data and have xclip be the provider of it, so you can then go ahead and close the app that contains the original information. Caveat: I'm not sure if this is binary-safe (though i would expect it to be), and don't know what would happen if you used it to clip a 20 meg gimp image. This technique becomes more convenient if you set it up as an action in a clipboard manager (eg klipper, parcellite). Some of these applets can take automatic action based on a variety of parameters, so you could probably just get it to always own the clipped data whenever data is clipped.

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Just use '-' to use STDIN as an additional input to 'cat'

find co-ordinates of a location
Alternative to http://commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6831/find-co-ordinates-of-a-location with $* instead of $1 so no need to quote multi-word locations

remove all spaces from all files in current folder

Erase to factory a pendrive, disk or memory card, and watch the progress

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Do a search-and-replace in a file after making a backup
sed already has an option for editing files in place and making backup copies of the old file. -i will edit a file in place and if you give it an argument, it will make a backup file using that string as an extension.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

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"


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