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Deal with dot files safely

convert filenames in current directory to lowercase

Get your external IP address ( 10 characters long )
Shortest url to a external IP-service, 10 characters.

connects to a serial console
e.g., 'screen -L /dev/ttyUSB0 38400' listens to your Holux M-241 GPS logger and turns on automatic logging

delete files containing matching text
-r recursively -Z zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline -l only filenames

check open ports (both ipv4 and ipv6)
While `lsof` will work, why not use the tool designed explicitly for this job? (If not run as root, you will only see the names of PID you own)

gawk gets fixed width field

Using numsum to sum a column of numbers.
numsum is part of of the num-utils package, which is available in some Linux distros and can also be downloaded at http://suso.suso.org/xulu/Num-utils. It contains about 10 different programs for dealing with numbers from the command line. Obviously you can do a lot of things that the num-utils programs do in awk, sed, bash, perl scripts, but num-utils are there so that you don't have to remember the syntax for more complex operations and can just think: compute the sum, average, boundary numbers, etc.

Quickest way to sort/display # of occurences

Parse m3u playlist file for total time
Parse an m3u file with seconds for each item and output the length of the entire playlist


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