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Find where a kind of file is stored
In this case searches for where .desktop files are stored. The resulted is a sorted list of the top directories containing such files.

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

for all who don't have the watch command
#Usage: watch timeinsecond "command"

grep compressed log files without extracting
accomplishes the same thing without unzipping the whole file, and while i have never seen a log.tar.gz file that was a binary, i will concede that it might happen, so add the -a in there: $zgrep -ia "string" log.tar.gz it's still shorter/easier to type...

Analyse writing style of writing style of a document
Style analyses the surface characteristics of the writing style of a document. It prints various readability grades, length of words, sentences and paragraphs. It can further locate sentences with certain characteristics. If no files are given, the document is read from standard input. style is part of "diction" package

On screen display of a command.
This is very useful if you need to show someone some text from a distance. (Like someone standing over your shoulder...) I'd recommend aliasing it to something like: alias osd_cat="osd_cat -o 400 -s 8 -c blue -d 60 -f -*-bitstream\ vera\ sans-*-*-*--200-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" xosd is the utility that provides osd_cat.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

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"

Skip to next selection in playlist
Uses process signal to play next selection

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.


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