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Calculate the distance between two geographic coordinates points (latitude longitude)
The Haversine formula determines the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes.

Remote screenshot
Say if you're logged into a remote system via ssh and this system has an x window system, but yet you still want a screen shot of what's going on graphically. This will do it for you. :-)

Sort the size usage of a directory tree by gigabytes, kilobytes, megabytes, then bytes.
Probably only works with GNU du and modern perls.

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Show recent earthquakes in Bay Area
To see only earthquakes for today, add another pipe to egrep "`date '+%Y/%m/%d'`"

random xkcd comic as xml

Remove a file whose name begins with a dash ( - ) character
Using the redundant ./ directory information prevents the dash from occurring at the beginning of the filename, and being interpreted as an option of the rm command. Also works using: $ rm -- -filename

compare two Microsoft Word documents
http://meld.sourceforge.net/ http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

Use all the cores or CPUs when compiling
Force make command to create as many compile processes as specified (4 in the example), so that each one goes into one core or CPU and compilation happens in parallel. This reduces the time required to compile a program by up to a half in the case of CPUs with 2 cores, one fourth in the case of quad cores... and so on.


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