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FizzBuzz in one line of Bash
The (in)famous "FizzBuzz" programming challenge, answered in a single line of Bash code. The "|column" part at the end merely formats the output a bit, so if "column" is not installed on your machine you can simply omit that part. Without "|column", the solution only uses 75 characters. The version below is expanded to multiple lines, with comments added. for i in {1..100} # Use i to loop from "1" to "100", inclusive. do ((i % 3)) && # If i is not divisible by 3... x= || # ...blank out x (yes, "x= " does that). Otherwise,... x=Fizz # ...set x to the string "Fizz". ((i % 5)) || # If i is not divisible by 5, skip (there's no "&&")... x+=Buzz # ...Otherwise, append (not set) the string "Buzz" to x. echo ${x:-$i} # Print x unless it is blanked out. Otherwise, print i. done | column # Wrap output into columns (not part of the test).

count the number of specific characters in a file or text stream
In this example, the command will recursively find files (-type f) under /some/path, where the path ends in .mp3, case insensitive (-iregex). It will then output a single line of output (-print0), with results terminated by a the null character (octal 000). Suitable for piping to xargs -0. This type of output avoids issues with garbage in paths, like unclosed quotes. The tr command then strips away everything but the null chars, finally piping to wc -c, to get a character count. I have found this very useful, to verify one is getting the right number of before you actually process the results through xargs or similar. Yes, one can issue the find without the -print0 and use wc -l, however if you want to be 1000% sure your find command is giving you the expected number of results, this is a simple way to check. The approach can be made in to a function and then included in .bashrc or similar. e.g. $ count_chars() { tr -d -c "$1" | wc -c; } In this form it provides a versatile character counter of text streams :)

Live stream a remote audio device over ssh using only ffmpeg
Change parameter 'plughw:0,0' in accordance with your audio device. To learn 'plughw' option, type the command aplay -l.

Play all files in the directory using MPlayer
Skip forward and back using the < and > keys. Display the file title with I.

Quick find function
A function that allows you to perform a case-insensitive search in the current directory, and directories in the current directory (but no further), for files containing the first argument anywhere in their names.

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"

List all the files that have been deleted while they were still open.
If your customer deletes a file that is still in use by a process, that space does not get freed up (will not show up in df) until that process either closes the file on its own, or is killed.

Burn CD/DVD from an iso, eject disc when finished.
cdrecord -scanbus will tell you the (x,y,z) value of your cdr (for example, mine is 3,0,0)

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"

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.


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