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Some useful linux tips

repeat is a useful built-in command in csh for this purpose. This comes extremely handy while doing performance benchmarking of programs, where we want to calculate average runtime over multiple runs. e.g:

repeat 3 ./a.out < inp.txt
Total Program runtime: 0.012 seconds.
Total Program runtime: 0.014 seconds.
Total Program runtime: 0.015 seconds.

The repeat command is not built-in bash shell. I have written this script that does something similar to csh repeat.

One may need to supress image quality in order to transfer/upload photos on internet. I have written this script which basically scales all the images in a directory to a smaller size. Note that this script makes use of convert command which comes alongwith ImageMagick installation. e.g:

[guest@user]./image-resize
Usage: ./image-resize input_dir resize_factor(in %)
[guest@user]./image-resize . 30%
Resizing image in directory . to ./resized geometry 30%
Resizing ./DSC00189.JPG ..
Resizing ./DSC00190.JPG ..

I find command line applications faster to use than their gui versions. The sdcv, console version of StarDict program has definetly made looking up word meanings easier for me.

Now I can simply do:

[guest@user] meaningof foo

to fetch meaning of the word 'foo'

[guest@user] pronounce foo

to play an audio saying 'foo'

To make these commands available, one can use this script. This could be directly put in or sourced from bashrc.

This minimal script lets you add/discard/say tasks from command line.

Give it a try!