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Terrorist threat level text
This line provides the same result by reading the output of a less arbitrary value. This is a personal choice on the matter, and the result on different machines may vary.

Generate random valid mac addresses
Doubt it actually generates valid mac addresses but this version doesn't need any external commands so it runs much faster. Much shorter as well.

Check if you need to run LaTeX to update the TOC
To check if the table-of-content in a LaTeX document is up-to-date, copy it to a backup before running LaTeX and compare the new .toc to the backup. If they are identical, it is updated. If not, you need to run LaTeX again.

Stamp a text line on top of the pdf pages.
To quickly add some remark, comment, stamp text, ... on top of (each of) the pages of the input pdf file.

pngcrush all .png files in the directory
Find all pngs in directory structure and pngcrush them, none destructive. You can just remove the "{}.crush" part if you want destructive.

Clone IDE Hard Disk
This command clone the first partition of the primary master IDE drive to the second partition of the primary slave IDE drive (!!! back up all data before trying anything like this !!!)

show all key and mouse events
for mousevents, move the mouse over the window and click/move etc. usefull for getting mouseKeys, or keyKeys. also usefull for checking if X gets those mouse-events.

Generate random password
Generates password consisting of alphanumeric characters, defaults to 16 characters unless argument given.

See how many more processes are allowed, awesome!
There is a limit to how many processes you can run at the same time for each user, especially with web hosts. If the maximum # of processes for your user is 200, then the following sets OPTIMUM_P to 100. $ OPTIMUM_P=$(( (`ulimit -u` - `find /proc -maxdepth 1 \( -user $USER -o -group $GROUPNAME \) -type d|wc -l`) / 2 )) This is very useful in scripts because this is such a fast low-resource-intensive (compared to ps, who, lsof, etc) way to determine how many processes are currently running for whichever user. The number of currently running processes is subtracted from the high limit setup for the account (see limits.conf, pam, initscript). An easy to understand example- this searches the current directory for shell scripts, and runs up to 100 'file' commands at the same time, greatly speeding up the command. $ find . -type f | xargs -P $OPTIMUM_P -iFNAME file FNAME | sed -n '/shell script text/p' I am using it in my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html especially for the xargs command. Xargs has a -P option that lets you specify how many processes to run at the same time. For instance if you have 1000 urls in a text file and wanted to download all of them fast with curl, you could download 100 at a time (check ps output on a separate [pt]ty for proof) like this: $ cat url-list.txt | xargs -I '{}' -P $OPTIMUM_P curl -O '{}' I like to do things as fast as possible on my servers. I have several types of servers and hosting environments, some with very restrictive jail shells with 20processes limit, some with 200, some with 8000, so for the jailed shells my xargs -P10 would kill my shell or dump core. Using the above I can set the -P value dynamically, so xargs always works, like this. $ cat url-list.txt | xargs -I '{}' -P $OPTIMUM_P curl -O '{}' If you were building a process-killer (very common for cheap hosting) this would also be handy. Note that if you are only allowed 20 or so processes, you should just use -P1 with xargs.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.


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