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Big Countdown Clock with hours, minutes and seconds
Figlet is easy to find for download on the internet, and works for any text. Quite cool.

Search some text from all files inside a directory

Multi line grep using sed and specifying open/close tags
Working with log files that contains variable length messages wrapped between open and close tags it may be useful to filter the messages upon a keyword. This works fine with GNU sed version 4.2 or higher, so pay attention to some unix distros (solaris, hp-ux, etc.). Linux should be ok.

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Spell check the text in clipboard (paste the corrected clipboard if you like)
xclip -o > /tmp/spell.tmp # Copy clipboard contents to a temp file aspell check /tmp/spell.tmp # Run aspell on that file cat /tmp/spell.tmp | xclip # Copy the results back to the clipboard, so that you can paste the corrected text I'm not sure xclip is installed in most distributions. If not, you can install x11-apps package

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

Start screen in detached mode
Start screen in detached mode, i.e., already running on background. The command is optional, but what is the purpose on start a blank screen process that way? It's useful when invoking from a script (I manage to run many wget downloads in parallel, for example).

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Retrieve the size of a file on a server
Downloads the entire file, but http servers don't always provide the optional 'Content-Length:' header, and ftp/gopher/dict/etc servers don't provide a filesize header at all.

quick integer CPU benchmark
This is a quick and dirty way to generate a (non-floating-point) CPU-bound task to benchmark. Adjust "20" to higher or lower values, as needed. As a benchmark this is probably a little less bogus than bogomips, and it will run anywhere 'bc' does.


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