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check open ports without netstat or lsof

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Dock Thunderbird in system tray and hide main window
Dock Thunderbird in system tray and hide main window. Very useful for startup scripts. Of course you can dock any app of your choice.

print text in color red
eg: $printTextInColorRed foo bar foo bar [in red color]

live ssh network throughput test
connects to host via ssh and displays the live transfer speed, directing all transferred data to /dev/null needs pv installed Debian: 'apt-get install pv' Fedora: 'yum install pv' (may need the 'extras' repository enabled)

Quick HTML image gallery from folder contents with Perl
This includes a title attribute so you can see the file name by hovering over an image. Also will hoover up any image format - jpg, gif and png.

Grep without having it show its own process in the results
The trick here is to use the brackets [ ] around any one of the characters of the grep string. This uses the fact that [?] is a character class of one letter and will be removed when parsed by the shell. This is useful when you want to parse the output of grep or use the return value in an if-statement without having its own process causing it to erroneously return TRUE.

Join flv files

Hold off any screensavers/timeouts
Moves the mouse 1 pixel down and to the right, then immediately back again, every 4 minutes. This keeps screensavers from turning on. I have used this extensively and I've never even noticed the mouse movement because it is so subtle.

Update program providing a functionality on Debian
On Debian systems, choose which command provides java. Works for all alternatives listed in /etc/alternatives.


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