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Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

A very quick and slick fork bomb. Handle with care. Don't run on production please...

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
For some reason the 2&>1 does not work for me, but the shorter stdout/stderr redirection >& works perfectly (Ubuntu 10.04).

Transcode .flac to .wav with gstreamer
Takes all .flac directories, feeds them into a simple transcode pipeline to spit out .wavs with the same name (but correct extension).

Start another X session in a window
You might have Xnest (older) rather than Xephyr. You can experiment with other desktops eg: startx /usr/bin/start-kde -- /usr/bin/Xephyr :2 You can start X on a remote machine (although I'd recommend vnc for anything slower than a LAN): startx /usr/bin/ssh -X gnome-session -- /usr/bin/Xephyr :2 Or just start another X session locally talking to the remote backend:

Check the status of a network interface

Add all unversioned files to svn
No need for grep, let awk do the match. This will not behave properly if the filenames contains whitespace, which is awk's default field separator.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy


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