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Count Files in a Directory with Wildcards.
Remove the '-maxdepth 1' option if you want to count in directories as well

Stoppable sleep
A nice way to interrupt a sleep with a signal.

Return threads count of a process
Source: http://superuser.com/questions/49408/how-do-i-monitor-or-view-the-thread-count-of-a-certain-process-on-aix

Post a message to another users screen via SSH
Post a message on another users screen via SSH

One liner to parse all epubs in a directory and use the calibre ebook-convert utility to convert them to mobi format
all ebook-convert -options are optional. all you really need to pass ebook-convert is the incoming and outgoing names, with extensions. Has been tested on Ubuntu 10.10

List all symbolic links in current directory
Many competing commands to do this, but since most people want a Long list with Human readable files sizes and want to see All files (including hidden (.*) files) this one wins on simplicity and usefulness. Plus grep is just as, if not more portable than sed or awk, and is more widely understood. :)

Shows users and 'virtual users' on your a unix-type system
Shows a list of users that currently running processes are executing as. YMMV regarding ps and it's many variants. For example, you might need: $ ps -axgu | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort -u

Get current Xorg resolution via xrandr
Not sure if it works the same on any shell.

Alert on high ping to know if it's really laggy while playing
Online games have pretty good lag compensation nowadays, Sometimes though, you really want to get some warning about your latency, e.g. while playing Diablo III in Hardcore mode, so you know when to carefully quit the game b/c your flatmate started downloading all his torrents at once. This is done on Darwin. On Linux/*nix you would need to find another suitable command instead of `say` to spell out your latency. And I used fping because it's a little bit easier to get the latency value needed. Something similar with our regular ping command could look like this: $ while :; do a=$(ping -c1 google.com | grep -o 'time.*' | cut -d\= -f2 | cut -d\ -f1 | cut -b1-4); [[ $a > 40 ]] && say "ping is $a"; sleep 3; done

print a python-script (or any other code) with syntax-highlighting and no loss of indentation


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