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Function to check whether a regular file ends with a newline
tail -c 1 "$1" returns the last byte in the file. Command substitution deletes any trailing newlines, so if the file ended in a newline $(tail -c 1 "$1") is now empty, and the -z test succeeds. However, $a will also be empty for an empty file, so we add -s "$1" to check that the file has a size greater than zero. Finally, -f "$1" checks that the file is a regular file -- not a directory or a socket, etc.

resize all JPG images in folder and create new images (w/o overwriting)
Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs

which program is this port belongs to ?
Sometimes you need to use a port that is already opened by some program , and you don't know who to "kill" for it to release - so, now you do !

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

Are the two lines anagrams?
This is just a slight alternative that wraps all of #7917 in a function that can be executed

foo <--> german translation with dict.leo.org
Translate strings from non-german to german (and vice versa) using LEO. Put it in your ~/.bashrc. Usage: $ leo words   To use another language other than english, use an option: $ leo -xx words Valid language options: ch - chinese en - english es - spanish fr - french it - italian pl - polish pt - portuguese ru - russian The other language will always be german!

Block all IPv4 addresses that has brute forcing our ssh server
For ipv6 use: grep -oE "\b([0-9A-Fa-f]{1,4}:){7}[0-9A-Fa-f]{1,4}\b"

Batch Convert SVG to PNG (in parallel)
Convert some SVG files into PNG using ImageMagick's convert command. Run the conversions in parallel to save time. This is safer than robinro's forkbomb approach :-) xargs runs four processes at a time -P4

monitor network traffic and throughput in real time
see http://iptraf.seul.org/ for all kinds of documentation and screenshots

Keep track of diff progress
You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. $ find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular.


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