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Run a command as root, with a delay
$ sleep 1h ; sudo command or $ sudo sleep 1h ; sudo command won't work, because by the time the delay is up, sudo will want your password again.

Convert your favorite image in xpm for using in grub
* size must be 640?480 pixels * only has 14 colors * save it in XPM format Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/grubimg.xpm make sure for your path name and hard disk

list files recursively by size

Search for packages, ranked by popularity
This will take the packages matching a given `apt-cache search` query (a collection of AND'd words or regexps) and tell you how popular they are. This is particularly nice for those times you have to figure out which solution to use for e.g. a PDF reader or a VNC client. Substitute "ubuntu.com" for "debian.org" if you want this to use Ubuntu's data instead. Everything else will work perfectly.

floating point operations in shell scripts
-l auto-selects many more digits (but you can round/truncate in your head, right) plus it loads a few math functions like sin().

backup and synchronize entire remote folder locally (curlftpfs and rsync over FTP using FUSE FS)
connect to a remote server using ftp protocol over FUSE file system, then rsync the remote folder to a local one and then unmount the remote ftp server (FUSE FS) it can be divided to 3 different commands and you should have curlftpfs and rsync installed

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Watch the progress of 'dd'
need pv (pipe view) : http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml

Play ISO/DVD-files and activate dvd-menu and mouse menu clicks.

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders


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