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Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Add a progress counter to loop (see sample output)
For this hack you need following function: $ finit() { count=$#; current=1; for i in "$@" ; do echo $current $count; echo $i; current=$((current + 1)); done; } and alias: $ alias fnext='read cur total && echo -n "[$cur/$total] " && read' Inspired by CMake progress counters.

Test network speed without wasting disk
The above command will send 4GB of data from one host to the next over the network, without consuming any unnecessary disk on either the client nor the host. This is a quick and dirty way to benchmark network speed without wasting any time or disk space. Of course, change the byte size and count as necessary. This command also doesn't rely on any extra 3rd party utilities, as dd, ssh, cat, /dev/zero and /dev/null are installed on all major Unix-like operating systems.

Rename all .jpeg and .JPG files to have .jpg extension
the "i" controls case sensitiveness. It's slightly inefficient since it uselessly renames .jpg to .jpg, but that's more than compensated by launching only one process instead of two, besides being shorter to write.

get a random 0/1, use it for on/off, yes/no
use it to add a random boolean switch to your script

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

An alternative to: python -m SimpleHTTPServer for Arch Linux
An alternative to: python -m SimpleHTTPServer for Arch Linux source: http://archlinux.me/dusty/2010/01/15/simplehttpserver-in-python-3/

shutdown pc in a 4 hours
you may as well use shutdown -h 18:32 to shutdown your machine at 18:32.


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