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Get the canonical, absolute path given a relative and/or noncanonical path
readlink -f accepts a relative, noncanonical path and emits the corresponding canonical, absolute path.

Create a thumbnail from a video file

Quick case-insenstive partial filename search
This is a simple command, but extremely useful. It's a quick way to search the file names in the current directory for a substring. Normally people use "ls *term*" but that requires the stars and is not case insensitive. Color (for both ls and grep) is an added bonus.

Convert JSON to YAML (unicode safe)
If you tried the other Python version of Convert JSON to YAML and you end up with lines that has "!!python/unicode", this version of the command is for you.

Find all active ip's in a subnet

Diff XML files
Diffs two xml files by formatting them first using xmllint and then invoking diff. Usage: diffxml XMLFile1 XMLFile2

pimp text output e.g. "Linux rocks!" to look nice

floating point operations in shell scripts
using bc is for sissies. dc is much better :-D Polish notation will rule the world...

run a VirtualBox virtual machine without a gui
you can launch a VirtualBox VM from the command line using VBoxManage, but that invokes it in a gui environment. If you want to just fire off your VM in the background, use VBoxHeadless as shown. To get the names and UUIDs of your VirtualBox VMs, type: $ VBoxManage list

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