I know of three command-line programs that will fiddle with theX selection (and/or the cut buffers) in a way that's usefulfor shell scripts: xsnarf from Smarasderagd's collectionof X things , xcb , and xclip .

I use xsnarf for a variety of reasons, I think partly historical (inthat I had it around well before I found the others); I'm jotting downthe other two here partly so that I have the information handy the nexttime someone asks me

In the spirit of my little shell scripts, here's a simple way to get auseful summary of disk space usage on a Unix system:

du | sort -nr | less

(substitute the pager of your choice for less , and use ' du -x ' asnecessary.)

This is less pretty than the various graphical disk space visualizationprograms that float around, but I find it gives me pretty much theinformation I need. It's pretty easy to narrow down what areas of thefilesystem,

This is one of those Bourne shell idioms where I show the code firstand explain the effect later:

#!/bin/shdef=$1; shiftcase "$#" in  0) if test -t 0; then        cat -- $def     else         cat     fi;;  *) cat -- "$@";;esac

Call this selfile . You use it in things like log scanning scripts,invoking it as:

selfile /var/log/something "$@" | .

Every so often in my Python programs I need to initialize adictionary with a whole bunch of values (and then pass it offsomewhere). For a long time, my usual approach to this was:

d = {}d['a'] = b.whatd['c'] = foo(d)....

Recently I stumbled over the better way to do this, which isembarrassingly obvious in retrospect:

d = {      'a': b.what,      'c