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Using mplayer to play the audio only but suppress the video
Sometimes you only want to linsten the audio while output the video will be a waste of CPU resource and an annoying window. With option -vo null, you will enjoy the audio!

Apply substitution only on the line following a marker
I've been auto-generating some complex GnuPlots; with multiplots the first plot of each group needs to be a 'plot' whereas the others need to be 'replots' to allow overplotting/autoscaling/etc to work properly. This is used to replace only the first instance of 'replot'.

"Pretty print" $PATH, separate path per line
from: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-and-scripting/28047-split-print-path.html

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Replaces a color in a PDF document, useful for removing a dark background before printing.
The pdf is first converted to a bitmap, so change "-density" to match your printer resolution. Also be careful about the RAM required. In this example rgb(0,0,0) is replaced by rgb(255,255,255), change to suit your needs.

Perform a branching conditional
This will perform one of two blocks of code, depending on the condition of the first. Essentially is a bash terniary operator. To tell if a machine is up: $ ping -c1 machine { echo succes;} || { echo failed; } Because of the bash { } block operators, you can have multiple commands $ ping -c1 machine && { echo success;log-timestamp.sh }|| { echo failed; email-admin.sh; } Tips: Remember, the { } operators are treated by bash as a reserved word: as such, they need a space on either side. If you have a command that can fail at the end of the true block, consider ending said block with 'false' to prevent accidental execution

batch crop images whit ImageMagick
Just starting to get in love with mogrify.

Colorized grep in less
Get your colorized grep output in less(1). This involves two things: forcing grep to output colors even though it's not going to a terminal and telling less to handle those properly.

Convert all WMF images to SVG recursively ignoring file extension case
This assumes you have the package installed necessary for converting WMF files. On my Ubuntu box, this is libwmf-bin. I used this command, as libwmf is not on my wife's iMac, so I archived the directories containing the WMF files from OS X, ran them on my Ubuntu box, archived the resulting SVGs, and sent them back to her. Quick, simple and to the point. Searches directories recursively looking for extensions ignoring case. This is much more readable and clean than -exec for find. The while loop also gives further flexibility on complex logic. Also, although there is 'wmf2svg --auto', it expects lowercase extensions, and not uppercase. Because I want to ignore case, I need to use the -o option instead. Works in ZSH and BASH. Haven't tested in other shells.

colored tail


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