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Open a file in a GTK+ dialog window
I use zenity because it's a rewrite of gdialog and also replaces gmessage and has more useful options. Using --text-info allows you to select and copy the text to your clipboard. To see a file in a list dialog: cat /etc/passwd | zenity --width 800 --height 600 --list --column Entries If you don't have zenity, you'll have to download it via apt-get install zenity, etc.

draw matrix using dot

Get lines count of a list of files
This command gives you the number of lines of every file in the folder and its subfolders matching the search options specified in the find command. It also gives the total amount of lines of these files. The combination of print0 and files0-from options makes the whole command simple and efficient.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted.
Enhanced version: fixes sorting by human readable numbers, and filters out non MB or GB entries that have a G or an M in their name.

Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes.
Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes. Works best in a shell script run at startup. acpi is called for temperature and fed to notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over.

Delete all but the latest 5 files, ignoring directories

Perl Command Line Interpreter
Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop - REPL

Show this month's calendar, with today's date highlighted
Explanation: * The date command evaluated to today's date with blank padded on the left if single digit * The grep command search and highlight today's date * The --before-context and --after-context flags displays up to 6 lines before and after the line containing today's date; thus completes the calendar. I have tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard and Xubuntu 8.10

Use /dev/full to test language I/O-failsafety
The Linux /dev/full file simulates a "disk full" condition, and can be used to verify how a program handles this situation. In particular, several programming language implementations do not print error diagnostics (nor exit with error status) when I/O errors like this occur, unless the programmer has taken additional steps. That is, simple code in these languages does not fail safely. In addition to Perl, C, C++, Tcl, and Lua (for some functions) also appear not to fail safely.


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