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List alive hosts in specific subnet
Works on any machine with nmap installed. Previous version does not work on machines without "seq". Also works on subnets of any size.

Determine space taken by files of certain type
Just how much space are those zillions of database logs taking up ? How much will you gain on a compression rate of say 80% ? This little line gives you a good start for your calculations.

Clone current directory into /destination verbosely
Copy every file from current directory to destination preserving modification time.

Use xdg-open to avoid hard coding browser commands
I rarely use the system menu to start applications. I use keyboard shortcuts instead. Keyboard shortcuts are convenient time savers. To configure the shortcuts I use gconf-editor or CompizConfig Settings Manager (if I have Compiz turned on). Lately I've been using Chromium as my browser. Since Chromium is under heavy development it occasionally becomes unusable and I have to switch back to Firefox. I was hard-coding the browser command in my keyboard shortcuts. This became problematic with frequent browser hopping. I now use the xdg-open command when defining my keyboard shortcuts. xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. In the metacity keybinging_commands I have xdg-open http://gmail.com where I used to have firefox http://gmail.com. Now when switching browsers I don't have to update each keyboard binding command I just change my default browser in Ubuntu by clicking through the menu: System / Preferences / Preferred Applications / Web Browser. xdg-open is more convenient for this browser hopper.

save date and time for each command in history
for the change stay in your history file , export command by writing it into your .bashrc

Watch Al Jazeera Livestream directly in mplayer #jan25
One cannot call the high quality livestream directly, but command this gives you a session ID and the high quality stream. #egypt #jan25

Convert a single-page PDF to a hi-res PNG, at 300dpi
If you skip this part: $ -density 300x300 you'll get a very lo-res image.

Your name backwards

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"

Convert all files *.mp4 to *.mpeg using ffmpeg (Windows Cmd line)
Note: %~nI expands %I to a file name only (cf. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490909.aspx)


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