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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"

Fill a hard drive with ones - like zero-fill, but the opposite :)
Note: Replace 200000 with drive bytes/512, and /dev/sdx with the destination drive/partition. ;) Note: You may need to install pipebench, this is easy with "sudo apt-get install pipebench" on Ubuntu. The reason I hunted around for the pieces to make up this command is that I wanted to specifically flip all of the bits on a new HDD, before running an Extended SMART Self-Test (actually, the second pass, as I've already done one while factory-zeroed) to ensure there are no physical faults waiting to compromise my valuable data. There were several sites that came up in a Google search which had a zero-fill command with progress indicator, and one or two with a fill-with-ones command, but none that I could find with these two things combined (I had to shuffle around the dd command(s) to get this to happen without wasting speed on an md5sum as well). For reference, these are the other useful-looking commands I found in my search: Zero-fill drive "/dev/sdx", with progress indicator and md5 verification (run sudo fdisk -l to get total disk bytes, then divide by 512 and enter the resulting value into this command for a full wipe) $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count= | pipebench | sudo tee /dev/sdx | md5sum And this command for creating a file filled with ones is my other main source (besides the above command and man pages, that is - I may be a Linux newbie but I do read!): $ tr '\000' '\377' < /dev/zero | dd of=allones bs=1024 count=2k Hope someone finds this useful! :) Cheers, - Gliktch

GREP a PDF file.
This is a good alternative to pdf2text for Ubuntu. To install it: sudo apt-get install python-pdfminer

Display text as though it is being typed out in real time
Pipe Viewer allows you to monitor the progress of a data transfer or command, or to show the time elapsed, among other things. In this use, it limits the transfer rate of the echo command to 10 bytes per second, making your text appear to be typed out in real time as in Hollywood movies. Fun!

Work out numerical last month
Work out last months numerical value.

Poor man's unsort (randomize lines)

Remove password from Bank Statement

String to binary
Cool but useless.

Create incremental snapshots of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Creates an incremental snapshot of individual folders.


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