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Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

Define words and phrases with google.
This version works on Mac (avoids grep -P, adding a sed step instead, and invokes /usr/bin/perl with full path in case you have another one installed). Still requires that you install perl module HTML::Entities ? here's how: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=640489

get the oldest file in a directory
reverse the sorting of ls to get the newest file: $ls -1tr --group-directories-first /path/to/dir/ | tail -n 1 Problems: If there are no files in the directory you will get a directory or nothing.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Dump an aspell dictionary as a word list

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

rot13 simple substitution cipher via command line
E.g. Useful for hiding spoilers in reviews, etc.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Find the cover image for an album
This bash function uses albumart.org to find the cover for an album. It returns an amazon.com url to the image. Usage: albumart [artist] [album] These arguments can be reversed and if the album name is distinct enough, it may be possible to omit the artist. The command can be extended with wget to automatically download the matching image like this: $ albumart(){ local x y="$@";x=$(awk '/View larger image/{gsub(/^.*largeImagePopup\(.|., .*$/,"");print;exit}'

Email HTML content
Note, this works because smtp is running


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