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get stdout to variable and stdout at sametime
Sometimes you want to write the script output to stdout but you need to send it to email. If you use: $ var="$( ls / )"; $ echo -e "$var"; works but, you need to wait the script terminate to bufferize then print the output var; With this way, you can use/work/print the output before the variable receive all the output content, then after it you can use the variable for anything else, like send email.

Convert ascii string to hex
Here's a version that uses perl. If you'd like a trailing newline: $ perl -pe 's/(.)/sprintf("\\x%x", ord($1))/eg; END {print "\n"}'

Check if running in an X session
If you want to display a dialog (using xdialog/kdialog/zenity) you need to make sure that you have a valid X session. Checks for the existence of the DISPLAY variable.

pipe commands from a textfile to a telnet-server with netcat
sends commands specified in $commandfile to the telnet-server specified by $telnetserver. to have newlines in $commandfile interpreted as ENTER, save the file in CR+LF (aka "Windows-Textfile") format. if you want to save the output in a separate file, use: $nc $telnetserver 23 < $commandfile > $resultfile

Easy way to scroll up und down to change to one of n last visited directories.
This alias is meant to append n (here is n=10) most recently used cd commands to the bottom of history file. This way you can easily change to one of previous visited directories simply by hitting 1-10 times arrow up key. Hint: You can make more aliases implying the same rule for any set of frequently used long and complex commands like: mkisof, rdesktop, gpg...

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"

Stream YouTube URL directly to mplayer.
This is the result of a several week venture without X. I found myself totally happy without X (and by extension without flash) and was able to do just about anything but watch YouTube videos... so this a the solution I came up with for that. I am sure this can be done better but this does indeed work... and tends to work far better than YouTube's ghetto proprietary flash player ;-) Replace $i with any YouTube ID you want and this will scrape the site for the _real_ URL to the full quality .FLV file on Youtube's server and will then will hand that over to mplayer (or vlc or whatever you want) to be streamed. In some browsers you can replace $i with just a % or put this in a shell script so all YouTube IDs can be handed directly off to your media player of choice for true streaming without the need for Flash or a downloader like clive. (I do however fully recommend clive if you wish to archive videos instead of streaming them) If any interest is shown I would be more than happy to provide similar commands for other sites. Most streaming flash players use similar logic to YouTube. Edit: 05/03/2011 - Updated line to work with current YouTube. It could be a lot prettier but I will probably follow up with another update when I figure out how to get rid of that pesky Grep. Sed should take that syntax... but it doesn't. Original (no longer working) command: mplayer -fs $(echo "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?$(curl -s $youtube_url | sed -n "/watch_fullscreen/s;.*\(video_id.\+\)&title.*;\1;p")")

Show apps that use internet connection at the moment.
show only the name of the apps that are using internet

Email yourself a quick message
Usage: mailme message This is a useful function if you want to get notified about process completion or failure. e.g. $ mailme "process X completed"

Prefix every line with a timestamp
Useful to add a timestamp to every line printed to stdout. You can use `-Ins` instead of `-Iseconds` if you want more precision.


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