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Repeat a portrait eight times so it can be cut out from a 6"x4" photo and used for visa or passport photos
Yes, You could do it in the GIMP or even use Inkscape to auto-align the clones, but the command line is so much easier. NOTE: The +clone and -clone options are just to shorten the command line instead of typing the same filename eight times. It might also speed up the montage by only processing the image once, but I'm not sure. "+clone" duplicates the previous image, the following two "-clone"s duplicate the first two and then the first four images. NOTE2: The -frame option is just so that I have some lines to cut along. BUG: I haven't bothered to calculate the exact geometry (width and height) of each image since that was not critical for the visa photos I need. If it matters for you, it should be easy enough to set using the -geometry flag near the end of the command. For example, if you have your DPI set to 600, you could use "-geometry 800x1200!" to make each subimage 1⅓ x 2 inches. You may want to use ImageMagick's "-density 600" option to put a flag in the JPEG file cuing the printer that it is a 600 DPI image. BUG2: ImageMagick does not autorotate images based on the EXIF information. Since the portrait photo was taken with the camera sideways, I made the JPEG rotate using jhead like so: jhead -autorot 2007-08-25-3685.jpg

Backticks are evil
This is a simple example of using proper command nesting using $() over ``. There are a number of advantages of $() over backticks. First, they can be easily nested without escapes: $ program1 $(program2 $(program3 $(program4))) versus $ program1 `program2 \`program3 \`program4\`\`` Second, they're easier to read, then trying to decipher the difference between the backtick and the singlequote: `'. The only drawback $() suffers from is lack of total portability. If your script must be portable to the archaic Bourne shell, or old versions of the C-shell or Korn shell, then backticks are appropriate, otherwise, we should all get into the habit of $(). Your future script maintainers will thank you for producing cleaner code.

Extract shortcuts and hostnames from .ssh/config
Spits out table that shows your Host->HostName aliases in ~/.ssh/config

find and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir

Speed up launch of liferea
If you use liferea frequently, you will see obvious speedup after you executed this command.

Paste the contents of OS X clipboard into a new text file

Unix commandline history substitution like ^foo^bar BUT for multiple replacements
#1 You invoked a command chain. #2 You globaly replace the scriptnames and execute them direct #3 The new executed command chain [# ^foo^bar] would only replace the firts match [foo] with [bar].

Find public IP when behind a random router (also see description)
Depends on GET. You can also replace GET with curl, or `wget -qO -` if GET isn't available.

Performance tip: compress /usr/
Periodically run the one-liner above if/when there are significant changes to the files in /usr/ = Before rebooting, add following to /etc/fstab : = $ /squashed/usr/usr.sfs /squashed/usr/ro squashfs loop,ro 0 0 $ usr /usr aufs udba=reval,br:/squashed/usr/rw:/squashed/usr/ro 0 0 No need to delete original /usr/ ! (unless you don't care about recovery). Also AuFS does not work with XFS

Removing images by size
Removes all png files whose geometry is not 280x190 pixels


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