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On screen display of a command.
This is very useful if you need to show someone some text from a distance. (Like someone standing over your shoulder...) I'd recommend aliasing it to something like: alias osd_cat="osd_cat -o 400 -s 8 -c blue -d 60 -f -*-bitstream\ vera\ sans-*-*-*--200-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" xosd is the utility that provides osd_cat.

Downsample mp3s to 128K
This will lower the quality of mp3 files, but is necessary to play them on some mobile devices.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using QPDF
Remove security restrictions from PDF documents using this very simple command on Linux and OSX. You need QPDF installed (http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/) for this to work.

See where a shortened url takes you before click

Crash bash, in case you ever want to for whatever reason
This is a very hackish way to do it that I'm mainly just posting for fun, and I guess technically can more accurately be said to result in undefined behavior. What the command does is tell the shell to treat libpng like it's a shell plugin (which it's most certainly not) and attempt to install a "png_create_read" command from the library. It looks for the struct with the information about the command; since it's always the command name followed by "_struct", it'll look for a symbol called "png_create_read_struct". And it finds it, since this is the name of one of libpng's functions. But bash has no way to tell it's a function instead of a struct, so it goes ahead and parses the function's code as if it was command metadata. Inevitably, bash will attempt to dereference an invalid pointer or whatever, resulting in a segfault.

Restore a local drive from the image on remote host via ssh

Display screen window number in prompt
Add this to your $HOME/.bashrc file. It will only set this prompt if it is running inside screen ($WINDOW var is set) Looks like this... $ ion@atomos:~[2]$

Generate random number with shuf
If you don't have seq or shuf, bash can be used.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

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


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