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repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"

run a command whenever a file is touched
This is useful if you'd like to see the output of a script while you edit it. Each time you save the file the command is executed. I thought for sure something like this already exists - and it probably does. I'm on an older system and tend to be missing some useful things. Examples: $ ontouchdo yourscript 'clear; yourscript somefiletoparse' Edit yourscript in a separate window and see new results each time you save. $ ontouchdo crufty.html 'clear; xmllint --noout crufty.html 2>&1 | head' Keep editing krufty.html until the xmllint window is empty. Note: Mac/bsd users should use stat -f%m. If you don't have stat, you can use perl -e '$f=shift; @s=stat($f); print "$s[9]\n";' $1

Create a tar archive using xz compression
Compress files or a directory to xz format. XZ has superior and faster compression than bzip2 in most cases. XZ is superior to 7zip format because it can save file permissions and other metadata data.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

output your microphone to a remote computer's speaker
This will output the sound from your microphone port to the ssh target computer's speaker port. The sound quality is very bad, so you will hear a lot of hissing.

List known debian vulnerabilities on your system -- many of which may not yet be patched.
You can search for CVEs at https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/ or use --report to get full links. This can be added to cron, but unless you're going to do manual patches, you'd just be torturing yourself.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

list files recursively by size

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.


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