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Detect encoding of a text file
This command gives you the charset of a text file, which would be handy if you have no idea of the encoding.

Fork Bomb for Windows
Quick and dirty forkbomb for all flavors of windows Do not use in production. Replace start with a command of your choice, this will just open a new command prompt and is pretty tricky to stop once started

sort ugly text
Often, when sorting you want the sort to ignore extraneous characters. The b, d, and f tell sort to ignore leading blanks, use 'dictionary order' (ignore punctuation), and ignore (fold) case. Add a "u" if you only want one copy of duplicate lines. This is a great command to use within vim to sort lines of text, using !}sort -bdf

dd with progress bar and statistics
This command utilizes 'pv' to show dd's progress. Notes on use with dd: -- dd block size (bs=...) is a widely debated command-line switch and should usually be between 1024 and 4096. You won't see much performance improvements beyond 4096, but regardless of the block size, dd will transfer every bit of data. -- pv's switch, '-s' should be as close to the size of the data source as possible. -- dd's out file, 'of=...' can be anything as the data within that file are the same regardless of the filename / extension.

Get just the IP for a hostname
has the benefit of being a bit more cross-platform.

Find corrupted jpeg image files
Finds all corrupted jpeg files in current directory and its subdirectories. Displays the error or warning found. The jpeginfo is part of the jpeginfo package in debian. Should you wish to only get corrupted filenames, use cut to extract them : $ find ./ -name *jpg -exec jpeginfo -c {} \; | grep -E "WARNING|ERROR" | cut -d " " -f 1

List Threads by Pid along with Thread Start Time
This command will list all threads started by a particular pid along with the start time of each thread. This is very valuable when diagnosing thread leaks.

Create a video screencast of any x11 window, with audio
The script gets the dimensions and position of a window and calls ffmpeg to record audio and video of that window. It saves it to a file named output.mkv

run command on a group of nodes in parallel
Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ Other examples would be: (echo foss.org.my; echo www.debian.org; echo www.freenetproject.org) | parallel traceroute seq -f %04g 0 9999 | parallel -X rm pict{}.jpg


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