Suppose you have 11 marbles, 4 of which are red, the rest being blue. The marbles are indistinguishable, apart from colour. How many different ways are there to arrange the marbles in a line? And how many ways are there to arrange them so that no two red marbles are adjacent?

There are simple mathematical solutions to these questions, but it's also possible to generate and count all possibilities directly on the command line, using little more than brace expansion, grep and wc!

The answer to the question posed above is that there are 330 ways of arranging the marbles in a line, 70 of which have no two red marbles adjacent. See the sample output.

To follow the call to marbles 11 4: after c=''; for i in $(seq $1); do c+='{b,r}'; done;, $c equals {b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}

After x=$(eval echo $c), and brace expansion, $x equals bbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbr ... rrrrrrrrrrb rrrrrrrrrrr, which is all 2^11 = 2048 strings of 11 b's and r's.

After p=''; for i in $(seq $2); do p+='b*r'; done;, $p equals b*rb*rb*rb*r

Next, after y=$(grep -wo "${p}b*"

Finally, grep -vc 'rr'

If you want a sequence that can be plotted, do:

seq 8 | awk '{print "e(" $0 ")" }' | bc -l | awk '{print NR " " $0}'

Other bc functions include s (sine), c (cosine), l (log) and j (bessel). See the man page for details.

The biggest advantage over atoponce's nifty original is not killing the scrollback. Written assuming bash, but shouldn't be terribly difficult to port to other shells. S should be multiple spaces, but I can't get commandlinefu to save/show them properly, any help?

Simple countdown clock that should be quite portable across any Bourne-compatible shell. I used to teach for a living, and I would run this code when it was time for a break. Usually, I would set "MIN" to 15 for a 15-minute break. The computer would be connected to a projector, so this would be projected on screen, front and center, for all to see.

Print a row of characters across the terminal. Uses tput to establish the current terminal width, and generates a line of characters just long enough to cross it. In the example '#' is used.

It's possible to use a repeating sequence by dividing the columns by the number of characters in the sequence like this:

or

You will lose chararacters at the end if the length isn't cleanly divisible.

Get there by going backwards and forgetting the numbers.

Will create a graph of the results for "x bottles of beer on the wall".

Requires Gnuplot.

Inspired by an xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/715/

For sample output see: http://tr.im/xbottlesofbeer

The loop is to compare cookies. You can remove it...

Maybe you wanna use curl...

Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

Other examples would be:

(echo foss.org.my; echo www.debian.org; echo www.freenetproject.org) | parallel traceroute

seq -f %04g 0 9999 | parallel -X rm pict{}.jpg

With counter format [001, 002, ..., 999] , nice with pictures or wallpapers collections.

See: http://imgur.com/JgjK2.png for example.

Do some serious benchmarking from the commandline. This will write to a file with the time it took to compress n bytes to the file (increasing by 1).

Run:

To see it in graph form.

uses the previous "chr" function and uses it to create the inverse function "ord" by brute force.

It's slow, It's inelegant, but it works.

I thought I needed ord/chr to do a cartesian cipher in shell script a whie ago, but eventualy I realized I could get fancy with tr and do the same thing...

This command generates a sequential login list. Good to be used as a source of new logins.

Nice command to create a list, you can create too with for command, but this is so faster.

Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

After this, just type:

You need to install "beep" before this would make the beep sound.

Save it in your .profile if you want to use it later

WARNING: this command won't exit until it is successful. You won't be able to CONTROL+C out of it.

Strangely enough, there is no option --lines=[negative] with tail, like the head's one, so we have to use sed, which is very short and clear, you see.

Strangely more enough, skipping lines at the bottom with sed is not short nor clear. From Sed one liner :

# delete the last 10 lines of a file

$ sed -e :a -e '$d;N;2,10ba' -e 'P;D' # method 1

$ sed -n -e :a -e '1,10!{P;N;D;};N;ba' # method 2

print multiple increasing years using cal - calendar -. You can also try