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Display a Lissajous curve in text
Use Ruby's standard Curses module to display a Lissajous curve in the console. Replace the "0.2" with different numbers for different curves.

Get all IPs via ifconfig
works on Linux and Solaris. I think it will work on nearly all *nix-es

Determine space taken by files of certain type
Just how much space are those zillions of database logs taking up ? How much will you gain on a compression rate of say 80% ? This little line gives you a good start for your calculations.

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

cat a bunch of small files with file indication
If you have a bunch of small files that you want to cat to read, you can cat each alone (boring); do a cat *, and you won't see what line is for what file, or do a grep . *. "." will match any string and grep in multifile mode will place a $filename: before each matched line. It works recursively too!!

Make ls output better visible on dark terminals in bash
Sometimes you have a situation where you cannot properly see the ls output when you are using a terminal w/a dark background. Usually bash has ls aliased to use colors, and you can easily get ls to use the default foreground color via simply unaliasing the command.

Compare a remote file with a local file
A little messy, but functional. Requires vim >= 7.x.

Save an HTML page, and covert it to a .pdf file
Uses htmldoc to perform the conversion

Advanced LS Output using Find for Formatted/Sortable File Stat info
I love this function because it tells me everything I want to know about files, more than stat, more than ls. It's very useful and infinitely expandable. $ find $PWD -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n' | sort -rgbS 50% 00761 drwxrw---x askapache:askapache 777:666 [06/10/10 | 06/10/10 | 06/10/10] [d] /web/cg/tmp The key is: # -printf '%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G [%AD | %TD | %CD] [%Y] %p\n' which believe it or not took me hundreds of tweaking before I was happy with the output. You can easily use this within a function to do whatever you want.. This simple function works recursively if you call it with -r as an argument, and sorts by file permissions. $ lsl(){ O="-maxdepth 1";sed -n '/-r/!Q1'

Which fonts are installed?
See all fonts installed in your system


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