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Make all GUI stuff show up on the display connected to the computer (when you're logged in via SSH)
If you have multiple displays or monitors the DISPLAY environment variable will tell X where to send the output. This is very handy for setting up a mediacenter at home. You can plugin the computer to the TV and then ssh to the computer and set the DISPLAY as above, then run your program and it will show up on the TV.

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Ripping VCD in Linux
Ripping VCD in Linux

Find the package that installed a command

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"

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.

A function to output a man page as a pdf file
Tested on Fedora 12. This function will take a man page and convert it to pdf, saving the output to the current working directory. In Gnome, you can then view the output with "gnome-open file.pdf", or your favorite pdf viewer.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Combine all .mpeg files in current directory into one big one.
Good old cat & output redirection. Using this method you can combine all kinds of things - even mpeg files. My video camera makes a series of .mpeg files that are broken into 4gb chunks. Using this command I can easily join them together. Even better, combined with the cp command the files can be copied and joined in one step.

quick copy
Utilizes shell expansion of {} to give the original filename and a new filename as arguments to `cp`. Can easily be extended to make multiple copies.


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