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create thumbnail of pdf

Use find to get around Argument list too long problem
Can be used for other commands as well, replace rm with ls. It is easy to make this shorter but if the filenames involved have spaces, you will need to do use find's "-print0" option in conjunction with xargs's "-0" option. Otherwise the shell that xargs uses to execute the "rm" command line will treat the space as a token separator, thereby treating the name as two (or more) names.

Monitor RAID IO Usage
Shows the IO of the raid sync

Email yourself after a job is done
This is a two part command that comes in really handy if you're running commands that take longer than you're willing to wait. The commands are separated by the semicolon(;) The first command is whatever you're attempting to do. The second commands emails you after the job completes.

Print the 10 deepest directory paths

sed edit-in-place using -a option instead of -i option (no tmp file created)
does the -i option open a tmp file? this method does not.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Generate a random text color in bash
The expression $(( $RANDOM * 6 / 32767 + 1 )) generates a random number between 1 and 6, which is then inserted into the escape sequence \e[3_m to switch the foreground color of the terminal to either red, green, yellow, blue, purple or cyan. The color can be reset using the escape sequence \e[0m. The full list of colors can be found here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Color_Bash_Prompt#List_of_colors_for_prompt_and_Bash

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"

Wordwrap long text string using "\n"
I used this fragment with Imagemagick convert so that I can place long text strings in pictures. The "\n" gets converted to a true newline in the image. So this fragment uses fold command to wrap the line and then sed to convert newlines (and any trailing spaces on the line) to the text "\n"


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Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

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