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Write on the console without being registered
just use a space to prevent commands from being recorded in bash's history on most systems

Shows you how many hours of avi video you have.
midentify.sh is part of mplayer, but you might have to locate it on your box.

Shows users and 'virtual users' on your a unix-type system
Shows a list of users that currently running processes are executing as. YMMV regarding ps and it's many variants. For example, you might need: $ ps -axgu | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort -u

Pick a random line from a file
This is from perldoc -q random.*line, which says: This has a significant advantage in space over reading the whole file in. You can find a proof of this method in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Section 3.4.2, by Donald E. Knuth. Who am I to argue with Don Knuth?

Encrypt and password-protect execution of any bash script
(Please see sample output for usage) script.bash is your script, which will be crypted to script.secure script.bash --> script.secure You can execute script.secure only if you know the password. If you die, your script dies with you. If you modify the startup line, be careful with the offset calculation of the crypted block (the XX string). Not difficult to make script editable (an offset-dd piped to a gpg -d piped to a vim - piped to a gpg -c directed to script.new ), but not enough space to do it on a one liner.

Creating shortened URLs from the command line

archlinux: shows list of files installed by a package
Shows the files which the package, for example gvim, installed on your system.

Find the package a command belongs to on debian-based distros

When was your OS installed?
shows also time if its the same year or shows year if installed before actual year and also works if /etc is a link (mac os)

list files by testing the ownership
Alternative to mnikhil's ls/awk solution


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