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Check if it's your binary birthday!
Print out your age in days in binary. Today's my binary birthday, I'm 2^14 days old :-) . This command does bash arithmatic $(( )) on two dates: Today: $(date +%s) Date of birth: $(date +%s -d YYYY-MM-DD) The dates are expressed as the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (Jan 1970), so we devide the difference by 86400 (seconds per day). . Finally we pipe "obase=2; DAYS-OLD" into bc to convert to binary. (obase == output base)

Unpack .tgz File On Linux
With -a you don't care about file type (bz2, gzip, etc.)

Print a list of installed Perl modules
This version works on an AIX system on which I have very limited permissions. The other version fails with "Can't open file /usr/opt/perl588/lib/site_perl/5.8.8/aix/auto/DBI/.packlist".

Set gnome wallpaper to a random jpg from the specified directory
Every time this is run it will change your background picture. For added fun Add some DBUS magic: . $HOME/.dbus/session-bus/`cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id`-0 export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and a crontab entry: */5 * * * * above_command_in_script.sh >/dev/null 2>/dev/null now wallpaper changes every 5 mins

Browse shared folder when you're the only Linux user
Under Ubuntu smbclient is part of the samba package. With the version I use (3.0.28a) cd-ing into folders with spaces in the name is a drag. You have to put the folder name in quotes: smb: \Shared\> cd "Marketing and PR"

check open ports without netstat or lsof

export iPad App list to txt file
This will generate the same output without changing the current directory, and filepath will be relative to the current directory. Note: it will (still) fail if your iTunes library is in a non-standard location.

Bind a key with a command
the -x option is for binding to a shell command

Recursively chmod all dirs to 755 and all files to 644

Returns the number of cores in a linux machine.
Original article in http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/display-number-of-processors-on-linux/


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