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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.

search google on os x
Searches Google, but requires no "", and will also search all terms input in the CL, eg: > google foo bar returns search URL "http://www.google.com/search?q=foo%20bar" You could also use awk to replace all spaces with a +, which is how the Google search handles spaces, but that makes it more than one line.

move you up one directory quickly
In bash, this turns on auto cd. If a command is just a directory name, it cd's into that directory.

bash function to check for something every 5 seconds
checkfor: have the shell check anything you're waiting for. 'while : ; do' is an infinite loop '$*' executes the command passed in 'sleep 5' - change for your tastes, sleep for 5 seconds bash, ksh, likely sh, maybe zsh Ctrl-c to break the loop

Indicates the position of my monitor buttons
I often need to change the brightness of my monitor. The symbols of the sensor buttons are not illuminated and on a black background .... invisible! Now i use osd_cat instead of a torch ;-)

move a lot of files over ssh
copy files to a ssh server with gzip compression

Find all files currently open in Vim and/or gVim
Catches .swp, .swo, .swn, etc. If you have access to lsof, it'll give you more compressed output and show you the associated terminals (e.g., pts/5, which you could then use 'w' to figure out where it's originating from): lsof | grep '\.sw.$' If you have swp files turned off, you can do something like: ps x | grep '[g,v]im', but it won't tell you about files open in buffers, via :e [file].

Kill all processes that listen to ports begin with 50 (50, 50x, 50xxx,...)
Run netstat as root (via sudo) to get the ID of the process listening on the desired socket. Use awk to 1) match the entry that is the listening socket, 2) matching the exact port (bounded by leading colon and end of column), 3) remove the trailing slash and process name from the last column, and finally 4) use the system(…) command to call kill to terminate the process. Two direct commands, netstat & awk, and one forked call to kill. This does kill the specific port instead of any port that starts with 50. I consider this to be safer.

Check syntax of all Perl modules or scripts underneath the current directory
Finds all *.p[ml]-files and runs a perl -c on them, checking whether Perl thinks they are syntactically correct

run complex remote shell cmds over ssh, without escaping quotes
It executes commands as arguments to ssh, avoiding problematic shell expansions, without the need of writing the commands in question to a temporary file, just reading them from STDIN.


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