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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().

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Simple Video Surveillance by email
This takes a picture (with the web cam) every 5 minutes, and send the picture to your e-mail. Some systems support mail -a "References: " so that all video surveillance emails are grouped in a single email thread. To keep your inbox clean, it is still possible to filter and move to trash video surveillance emails (and restore these emails only if you really get robbed!) For instance with Gmail, emails sent to me+trash@gmail.com can be filtered with "Matches: DeliveredTo:me+trash@gmail.com"

coloured tail
tail with coloured output with the help of perl - need more colours? here is a colour table: http://www.tuxify.de/?p=23

Change mysql prompt to be more verbose
You can put this into your shell sourced file like .bashrc or .zshrc to have a different mysql prompt. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/de/mysql-commands.html for more informations. Beware that currently with mysql 5.5 the seconds are buggy and won't be displayed if you put this into a .cnf file. With the enironment variable this will work.

Search for classes in Java JAR files.

m4a to mp3 conversion with ffmpeg and lame
A batch file version of the same command would be: for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec libmp3lame -ab 256k "${f%.m4a}.mp3"; done

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

Get simple weather info from a zip code
$ weather 97405

ssh autocomplete based on ~/.ssh/config
I use this in my bashrc to expand hosts defined in ~/.ssh/config: function _ssh_completion() { perl -ne 'print "$1 " if /^Host (.+)$/' ~/.ssh/config } complete -W "$(_ssh_completion)" ssh Here's a great article on how to setup your own ~/.ssh/config: http://blogs.perl.org/users/smylers/2011/08/ssh-productivity-tips.html


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