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Count the number of characters in a string from the standard input.

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"

run a command whenever a file is touched
This is useful if you'd like to see the output of a script while you edit it. Each time you save the file the command is executed. I thought for sure something like this already exists - and it probably does. I'm on an older system and tend to be missing some useful things. Examples: $ ontouchdo yourscript 'clear; yourscript somefiletoparse' Edit yourscript in a separate window and see new results each time you save. $ ontouchdo crufty.html 'clear; xmllint --noout crufty.html 2>&1 | head' Keep editing krufty.html until the xmllint window is empty. Note: Mac/bsd users should use stat -f%m. If you don't have stat, you can use perl -e '$f=shift; @s=stat($f); print "$s[9]\n";' $1

Factory reset your harddrive. (BE CAREFUL!)

Prepend a text to a file.
Using the sed -i (inline), you can replace the beginning of the first line of a file without redirecting the output to a temporary location.

Check host port access using only Bash:

Compare two directory trees.

Fixes Centos 6.2 yum's metalink certificate errors
Fix's centos 6.2 yum's error: could not get metalink https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=x86_64 error was 14: PYCURL ERROR 77 - "Problem with the SSL CA cert (path? access rights?)" Error: Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: epel-source. Please verify its path and try again

quick integer CPU benchmark
This is a quick and dirty way to generate a (non-floating-point) CPU-bound task to benchmark. Adjust "20" to higher or lower values, as needed. As a benchmark this is probably a little less bogus than bogomips, and it will run anywhere 'bc' does.

Open Remote Desktop (RDP) from command line having a custom screen size
This example uses xfreerdp, which builds upon the development of rdesktop. This example usage will also send you the remote machine's sound.


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