Schematics: command [options] [paste your variable here] parameter command [options] [paste entire column of variables here] parameter ... (hard-code command "c" and parameter "e" according to your wishes: in example shown command = "cp -a" and parameter = "~") Features: - Quick exchange only variable part of a long command line - Make variable part to be an entire column of data (i.e. file list) - Full control while processing every single item Hints: Paste column of data from anywhere. I.e. utilize the Block Select Mode to drag, select and copy columns (In KDE Konsole with Ctrl+Alt pressed, or only Ctrl pressed in GNOME Terminal respectively). Disadvantages: You can paste only one single variable in a row. If there are more space separated variables in a row only first one will be processed, but you can arrange your variables in a column instead. To transpose rows to columns or vice versa look at Linux manual pages for 'cut' and 'paste'. TODO: - add edit mode to vary command "c" and parameter "e" on the fly - add one edit mode more to handle every list item different - add y/n/a (=All) instead of only y(=default)/n to allowed answers Disclaimer: The code is not optimized, only the basic idea is presented here. It's up to you to shorten code or extend the functionality. Show Sample Output

If $INBACK is set, command will launch in foreground and inverse. Very useful in script ! We could apply the inverse comportement like that : eval command ${INBACK:+&}

iterating range of numer with for loop in shell or bash Show Sample Output

If you put this in your .bashrc, you might also want to add this to make it use the colors by default: alias ls="ls --color=auto"

It is not easy to make perl give a segfault, but this does it. This is a known issue but apparently not easy to fix. This is completely useless except for showing people that perl is not bullet-proof. Show Sample Output

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' Show Sample Output