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Outputs files with ascii art in the intended form.
Files containing ascii art (e.g. with .nfo extension) are typically not correctly reproduced at the command line when using cat. With iconv one can easily write a wrapper to solve this: $ #!/bin/bash $ if [ -z "$@" ]; then echo "Usage: $(basename $0) file [file] ..." $ else iconv -f437 -tutf8 "$@"; fi $ exit 0

Watch the size of a directory using figlet
You can substitute /home/$USER with any path you like.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Real time satellite wheather wallpaper
Changes the wallpaper to the last satellite image. Tha url above shows latin america. Seek the best url for your location Now I have a usefull background image in my desktop I use it inside kalarm updating every 15 minutes. May be done with 'watch' instead It s an option to xplanet ( kde ) and xearth needs xli , curl

Restart Xen XAPI
Restarts the XAPI service on the host, mostly used by Xen Center. It does not affect any running VMs, just the Xen client tools that may be connected. On my list as XAPI frustratingly keeps running out of memory and getting killed off.

peak amount of memory occupied by any process with "FOO" in its name
Show the maximum amount of memory that was needed by a process at any time. My use case: Having a long-running computation job on $BIG_COMPUTER and judging whether it will also run on $SMALL_COMPUTER.   http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html VmHWM: Peak resident set size ("high water mark")

Equivalent to ifconfig -a in HPUX

Get the IP of the host your coming from when logged in remotely
Even faster without the need for cut... :)

First file editor for newbies
This command should be the first file-editing command for a newbie. It clears file.txt (cat), and asks for input until EOF is entered on its own line (not written to file.txt).

Easy and fast access to often executed commands that are very long and complex.
When using reverse-i-search you have to type some part of the command that you want to retrieve. However, if the command is very complex it might be difficult to recall the parts that will uniquely identify this command. Using the above trick it's possible to label your commands and access them easily by pressing ^R and typing the label (should be short and descriptive). UPDATE: One might suggest using aliases. But in that case it would be difficult to change some parts of the command (such as options, file/directory names, etc).


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