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Expand shortened URLs
curl(1) is more portable than wget(1) across Unices, so here is an alternative doing the same thing with greater portability. This shell function uses curl(1) to show what site a shortened URL is pointing to, even if there are many nested shortened URLs. This is a great way to test whether or not the shortened URL is sending you to a malicious site, or somewhere nasty that you don't want to visit. The sample output is from: $ expandurl http://t.co/LDWqmtDM

Show biggest files/directories, biggest first with 'k,m,g' eyecandy
I use this on debian testing, works like the other sorted du variants, but i like small numbers and suffixes :)

Find all active ip's in a subnet
nmap for windows and other platforms is available on developer's site: http://nmap.org/download.html nmap is robust tool with many options and has various output modes - is the best (imho) tool out there.. from nmap 5.21 man page: -oN/-oX/-oS/-oG : Output scan in normal, XML, s|

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().

find and remove old compressed backup files
remove all compressed files in /home/ folder not created in the last 10 days

Burn CD/DVD from an iso, eject disc when finished.
cdrecord -scanbus will tell you the (x,y,z) value of your cdr (for example, mine is 3,0,0)

convert video to gif by ffmpeg and imagemagick
you can use any common video format. if you don't need to change the size of gif output, just remove `-vf scale=320:-1` btw, 320:-1 means width is 320px and height would be set automatically

list files recursively by size

Find the package that installed a command

live netcat network throughput test
On the another machine write this command. pv -r /dev/zero | nc 192.168.1.1 7777 It will show live throughput between two machine.The destination machine ip is at our example 192.168.1.1 You must multiply by 8 for the network calculation. You must install pv and netcat commands for this commands usage. kerim@bayner.com http://www.bayner.com/


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