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Run a command for a given time
or "Execute a command with a timeout" Run a command in background, sleep 10 seconds, kill it. $! is the process id of the most recently executed background command. You can test it with: find /& sleep10; kill $!

Remote screenshot
Admittedly, I'd never have thought of this without the earlier examples, but here's one that you can execute from your workstation to just display the image from another, without separately doing a file transfer, etc. By the way, I hear a loud beep coming from the other room, so I guess it's not too stealthy :-D

give me back my sound card
for when a program is hogging the sound output. finds, and kills. add -9 to the end for wedged processes. add in 'grep ^program' after lsof to filter.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Find out when your billion-second anniversary is (was).
Replace 12/31/1970 with your birth date.

Search big files with long lines
This is a handy way to circumvent the "Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded" grep error. Once you have run the above command (or put it in your .bashrc), files can be searched using: $ lgrep search-string /file/to/search

Show total disk space on all partitions
show off how big your disks are

commandline dictionary
Note: 1) Replace 'wonder' with any word you looking the meaning for in the above example 2) Need to install these packages: wordnet & wordnet-base (latter should be automatically installed because of dependency) 3) Combined size of packages is about 30MB on my old ubuntu system (I find it worth it)

Get memory total from /proc/meminfo in Gigs

Output system statistics every 5 seconds with timestamp
See man vmstat for information about the statistics. This does the same thing without the timestamp: $vmstat 5


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