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computes the most frequent used words of a text file
using $ cat WAR_AND_PEACE_By_LeoTolstoi.txt | tr -cs "[:alnum:]" "\n"| tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sort -S16M | uniq -c |sort -nr | cat -n | head -n 30 ("sort -S1G" - Linux/GNU sort only) will also do the job but as some drawbacks (caused by space/time complexity of sorting) for bigger files...

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Change pidgin status
Thanks for the comment oshazard, i wasn't aware of purple-remote existence.

Import SQL into MySQL with a progress meter
This uses PV to monitor the progress of the MySQL import and displays it though Zenity. You could also do this pv ~/database.sql | mysql -u root -pPASSWORD -D database_name and get a display in the CLI that looks like this 2.19MB 0:00:06 [ 160kB/s] [> ] 5% ETA 0:01:40 My Nautalus script using this command is here http://www.daniweb.com/forums/post1253285.html#post1253285

Verbosely delete files matching specific name pattern, older than 15 days.

vim as a pager - similar to less command but with color
use vim like less command pager but with color highlighting = pretty :p also u can use /usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.sh

Labyrinth pattern
Generates labyrinth-like pattern on UTF-8 terminal in bash. For fun ;)

Append a pub key from pem file and save in remote server accessing with another key
Useful if you need to add another key and you using pem files (typical in AWS EC2 Instances). If you use it in EC2 instances, remember that password authentication is disabled, so you have to use the first key generated when you generated the instance

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

Check syntax of all Perl modules or scripts underneath the current directory
Finds all *.p[ml]-files and runs a perl -c on them, checking whether Perl thinks they are syntactically correct


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