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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'

List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location
Simple and easy to remember. -h is human, -d1 = depth 1. disk usage, human, depth 1

cat large file to clipboard with speed-o-meter
shortest alternative without the speed-o-meter"xclip large.xml" "xclip -o" to get the clipboard content, alternatively [shift key] + insert or middle button of your mouse.

Search some text from all files inside a directory

DVD to YouTube ready watermarked MPEG-4 AVI file using mencoder (step 2)
Reencodes to MPEG-4 DivX output video file from step 1. Audio stream is simply copied. Resizes to 320x240 and deinterlaces as needed. A heading subtitle file is applied as watermark. This heading subtitle file can be a URL.

Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes.
works best in a shell script run at startup. It will ping localhost once and output to null, after it does that, acpi is called for temperature in fahrenheit and piped through to another loop that feeds notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over.

Lets Tux say the random fact. [add it to .bashrc to see it in new terminal window]

Google URL shortener
Shorter and made into a function.

Backup (archive) your Gmail IMAP folders.
Copies an entire hierarchy of mailboxes from the named POP3/IMAP/etc. source to the named destination. Mailboxes are created on the destination as needed. NOTE: The 'mailutil' is Washington's University 'mailutil' (apt-get install uw-mailutils). More examples $ mailutil transfer {imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=you@gmail.com}INBOX Gmail/ ; mailutil check imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=you@gmail.com}\[Gmail\]/Spam If you use the utility in the first, append -v|-d flag(s) to the end the commands above (man mailutil).

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him


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