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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"

Execute a command at a given time
This command will create a popup reminder window to assist in remembering tasks http://i.imgur.com/2n7viiA.png is how it looks when created

Add fade in/out to first & last 25 frames of a video
Replace vid.mp4 with the path to your original video file, and out.mp4 to the path where you want to save the new file. To view the output first before saving, remove "-consumer avformat:out.mp4" from the end. Documentation for mlt framework and melt command can be found here: http://www.mltframework.org/bin/view/MLT/Documentation

pipe output of a command to your clipboard
In turn you can get the contents of your clipboard by typing xsel by itself with no arguments: $ xsel This command requires you to install the xsel utility which is free

ssh autocomplete
Stop tormenting the poor animal cat. See http://sial.org/howto/shell/useless-cat/. Edit: replaced $ sort | uniq by $ sort -u

Top ten memory hogs
Inspired by #7065

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

find text in a file
this will find text in the directory you specify and give you line where it appears.

Use QEMU to create a hardware dual-boot without rebooting
After downloading an ISO image, assuming you have QEMU installed, it’s possible to boot an ISO image in a virtual machine and then install that ISO from within the virtual machine directly to a physical drive, bypassing the need to reboot. Simply pass the ISO image as the -cdrom parameter, followed by “format=raw,file=/dev/sdb” (replace /dev/sdb with the drive you want to install to) as the hard drive parameter (making absolutely certain to specify the raw format, of course). Once you boot into the ISO image with QEMU, just run the installer as if it were a virtual machine — it’ll just use the physical device as an install target. After that, you’ll be able to seamlessly boot multiple distros (or even other operating systems) at once.

Default value or argument
I used it for this function, which prints hashes: function liner { num_lines=${1:-42} echo printf %${num_lines}s|tr " " "#" echo } Note the colon-dash, instead of the usual colon-equals.


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