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

Tail -f at your own pace
The -s option allows you to specify the update interval

create screencast (record text and audio simultaneously) using 'script' and 'arecord'
This shell function takes a single argument, which is used as the base name of the .wav, .timing and .session files created. To create a screencast: $ screencast test type and talk ... then type 'exit' or to exit the screencast. test.wav will contain the audio from your screencast. test.session will contain text and control characters needed to paint the screen test.timing will contain timing information needed to synch individual keystrokes in test.session with the audio. to play back: $ aplay test.wav & scriptreplay test.{timing,session} NOTE: because the shell function uses the variable "$!", and bash likes to expand '!' during history expansion, you will need to turn off bash's history before you enter the shell function. This can be achieved using the command $set +H

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.
If BREs can be used, this sed version will also get the job done.

Get list of servers with a specific port open
Change the -p argument for the port number. See "man nmap" for different ways to specify address ranges.

Generate 2000 images with its number written on it

Determine if photos have been rotated to portrait orientation instead of normal landscape orientation
Most people take photos in landscape orientation (wider than it is tall). Sometimes though you turn the camera sideways to capture a narrow/tall subject. Assuming you then manually rotate those picture files 90 degrees for proper viewing on screen or photo frame, you now have a mix of orientations in your photos directory. This command will print out the names of all the photos in the current directory whose vertical resolution is larger than its horizontal resolution (i.e. portrait orientation). You can then take that list of files and deal with them however you need to, like re-rotating back to landscape for consistent printing with all the others. This command requires the "identify" command from the ImageMagick command-line image manipulation suite. Sample output from identify: $ identify PICT2821.JPG PICT2821.JPG JPEG 1536x2048 1536x2048+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 688KB 0.016u 0:00.006

Get your outgoing IP address

Find Duplicate Files (based on MD5 hash) -- For Mac OS X
This works on Mac OS X using the `md5` command instead of `md5sum`, which works similarly, but has a different output format. Note that this only prints the name of the duplicates, not the original file. This is handy because you can add `| xargs rm` to the end of the command to delete all the duplicates while leaving the original.


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