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find out how many days since given date
You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

Print one . instead of each line
If you're running a command with a lot of output, this serves as a simple progress indicator. This avoids the need to use `/dev/null` for silencing. It works for any command that outputs lines, updates live (`fflush` avoids buffering), and is simple to understand.

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"

Countdown Clock
Countdown clock - Counts down from $MIN minutes to zero. I let the date command do the maths. This version doesn't use seq.

DVD-Rip
Make backups of your home DVDs easily. Other: mencoder dvd://1 -o "$targetDir/$dvdTitle.avi" -aid "$audioID" -ovc x264 -x264encopts qp=26:frameref=3:bframes=15:direct_pred=auto:cabac:weight_b:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=esa:me_range=24:subq=7:mixed_refs:trellis=2:bitrate=1000:nofast_pskip:threads=0 -oac mp3lame

ps with parent/child process tree
Shows a tree view of parent to child processes in the output of ps (linux). Similar output can be achieved with pstree (also linux) or ptree (Solaris).

shuffle lines via perl
Same, without modules... Probably smarter option: just use the shuf command or even sort -R.

Print a row of 50 hyphens

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

Find the package that installed a command


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