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Capture video of a linux desktop

Sort and count subjects of emails stuck in Exim queue

Make the "tree" command pretty and useful by default
I got really tired of having tree always show me tons of .svn and .git stuff that I don't care about. With this alias, "tree" uses pretty colors, snazzy line graphics, and ignores any source control and package mumbojumbo. (Customize the *.*.package glob, of course.)

Function to output an ASCII character given its decimal equivalent
I've corrected the function. My octal conversion formula was completely wrong. Thanks to pgas at http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/071 for setting me straight. The new function is from pgas and is very fast.

Copy input sent to a command to stderr
In the above example 'muspi merol' (the output of the first rev command) is sent to stderr and 'lorem ipsum' (the output of the second rev command) is sent to stdout. rev reverse lines of a file or files. This use of tee allows testing if a program correctly handles its input without using files that hold the data.

Dump the root directory to an external hard drive
This will compress the root directory to an external hard drive and split it to parts once it reaches the 4 Gigs file system limit. You can simply restore it with: $ restore ivf /media/My\ Passport/Fedora10bckup/root_dump_fedora

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit
This allows for sleeping in between pings. Also, espeak needs to be installed.

Awk: Perform a rolling average on a column of data
Sometimes jittery data hides trends, performing a rolling average can give a clearer view.

Remove all unused kernels with apt-get
This should do the same thing and is about 70 chars shorter.


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