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Calculate pi with specific scale
a() function in bc is for arctangent, available if using -l option included.

Show one line summaries of all DEB packages installed on Ubuntu based on pattern search
I sometimes want to know what packages are installed on my Ubuntu system. I still haven't figured out how to use aptitude effectively, so this is the next best thing. This allows finding by name. The grep '^ii' limits the display to only installed packages. If this is not specified, then it includes listing of non-installed packages as well.

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"

Sort movies by length, longest first
Sort .avi movies by time length, print the longest first, and so on...

easily find megabyte eating files or directories

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Yet another way to add a line at the top a of text file with the help of the tac command (reverse cat).

Combine all .mpeg files in current directory into one big one.
Good old cat & output redirection. Using this method you can combine all kinds of things - even mpeg files. My video camera makes a series of .mpeg files that are broken into 4gb chunks. Using this command I can easily join them together. Even better, combined with the cp command the files can be copied and joined in one step.

delete duplicate lines from a file and keep the order of the other lines
i wanted to delete all duplicate lines from .bash_history and keep the order of the other lines. the command cat's the file and adds line numbers, then sorts by the second column. afterwards uniq omits repeated lines, but skips the first field (the line number). then it sorts by the line numbers and at the end cuts the numbers off.

compare two Microsoft Word documents
http://meld.sourceforge.net/ http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

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