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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

Display a block of text: multi-line grep with perl
-n reads input, line by line, in a loop sending to $_ Equivalent to while () { mycode } -e execute the following quoted string (i.e. do the following on the same line as the perl command) the elipses .. operator behaves like a range, remembering the state from line to line.

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"

Auto download Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with super fast zsync
Need to have rc iso pre-downloaded before running command.

Find top 10 largest files in /var directory (subdirectories and hidden files included )
Should work even when very large files exist.

Configure a serial line device so you can evaluate it with a shell script
I had a hard time in finding the correct settings to get reasonable output from a coin selector which sends its data over a serial line. In the end, minicom came to the rescue and pointed me on the right track. So, if you need to do something similar, these settings may help you. Replace ttyUSB0 with your device file, 9600 with your baud rate, 5 with your read timeout (10ths of a second), and 1 with the minimum numbers of characters you want to read. You can then open the device file like you are used to do, example: $ DATA="`xxd -ps -l 5 \"$DEV\"`"

Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes.
works best in a shell script run at startup. It will ping localhost once and output to null, after it does that, acpi is called for temperature in fahrenheit and piped through to another loop that feeds notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over.

Set executable permissions on a file under Subversion
This avoids the "chmod +x filename" after performing a check out or export. From http://snipplr.com/view/5277/set-executable-permissions-on-a-file-under-subversion/

Format ps command output
ps command gives the possibility to display information with custom formatting with the -o options followed by the format specifier list.

Display a block of text: multi-line grep with perl
-n reads input, line by line, in a loop sending to $_ Equivalent to while () { mycode } -e execute the following quoted string (i.e. do the following on the same line as the perl command) the elipses .. operator behaves like a range, remembering the state from line to line.


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