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Merge files, joining each line in one line
Merge files, joining line by line horizontally. Very useful when you have a lot of files where each line represents an info about an event and you want to join them into a single file where each line has all the info about the same event See the example for a better understanding

An alarm clock using xmms2 and at
I like the order of the arguments better this way.

Plot frequency distribution of words from files on a terminal.
Uses the dumb terminal option in gnuplot to plot a graph of frequencies. In this case, we are looking at a frequency analysis of words in all of the .c files.

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Enable programmable bash completion in debian lenny
The really awesome bash completion in debian seems to be an extra package now, which has to be installed. After sourcing /etc/bash_completion it completes almost everything (package names in apt... etc) :-) To make this permanent, put something like this in your .bashrc: if [ -f /etc/bash_completion]; then source /etc/bash_completion fi

Convert a flv video file to avi using mencoder

check open ports without netstat or lsof

a simple bash one-liner to create php file and call php function

Diff XML files
Diffs two xml files by formatting them first using xmllint and then invoking diff. Usage: diffxml XMLFile1 XMLFile2

list files recursively by size


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