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Check if the LHC has destroyed the world
This says if the LHC has destroyed the world. Run it in a loop to monitor the state of Earth. Might not work reliable, if the world has actually been destroyed.

Count Files in a Directory with Wildcards.
If the dir | wc -l Command not working.

list files recursively by size

Print just line 4 from a textfile
Prints the 4th line and then quits. (Credit goes to flatcap in comments: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6031/print-just-line-4-from-a-textfile#comment.)

Delicious search with human readable output
You can install filterous with $ sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev; sudo easy_install -U filterous

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Far from my favorite, but works in sh and with an old sed that doesn't support '-E'

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
This version uses netcat to check a particular service.

Determine MAC address of remote host when you know its IP address
arping sends ARP requests to a neighboring host. This won't work if there is an ARP subnet gateway in the middle. If there is, you'll just get the gateway's MAC address not the host's address you are really trying to get to.

Make .bashrc function to backup the data you changed last houres
The original overwrites any previous backups, and only saves exactly the last hours worth, but not 1 hour + 1 minute. This version creates or appends files, and backs up everything since the last backup (using the backups timestamp as the reference), plus it uses TMPDIR if set.


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