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convert plain .avi movies to .mpeg
works "out of the box" on ubuntu 8.10

find and reduce 8x parallel the size of JPG images without loosing quality via jpegoptim

Find broken symlinks

Display Spinner while waiting for some process to finish
alternatively, run the spinner for 5 seconds: timeout 5 bash -c 'spinner=( Ooooo oOooo ooOoo oooOo ooooO oooOo ooOoo oOooo); while true; do for i in ${spinner[@]}; do for j in seq 0 ${#i}; do echo -en "\b\b"; done; echo -ne "${i}"; sleep 0.2; done; done'

grep certain file types recursively

Base conversions with bc
Easily convert numbers to their representations in different bases. Passing "ibase=16; obase=8; F2A" to bc will convert F2A (3882 in decimal) from Hex to Octal, and so on.

Know which modules are loaded on an Apache server
This let you know which modules has loaded the Apache server, very useful to know if the mod_rewrite is ready to use.

Report all quota usage
Check disk quota for all user

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

Encrypted archive with openssl and tar
The lifehacker way: http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-data-178005.php#Alternate%20Method:%20OpenSSL "That command will encrypt the unencrypted-data.tar file with the password you choose and output the result to encrypted-data.tar.des3. To unlock the encrypted file, use the following command:" $ openssl des3 -d -salt -in encrypted-data.tar.des3 -out unencrypted-data.tar


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