Trivial Linux commands save the day

Today was my son's science fair. He and his friend had planned to electrolyze water and ignite pockets of hydrogen they gathered in a small cup. About an hour before the science fair my wife called and said the kids wouldn't be allowed to ignite anything. (These were very small, controlled ignitions, but I understood why the school might be nervous.)

We had some video files on one of our home computers of the boys doing the experiment, and my wife asked if there was any way to get them. So I scp'd them to a machine at work, took that machine and a monitor to the school, and hooked it up.

These video files were short, and I didn't want the kids to have to fiddle around with restarting the videos every minute or so. About the time I finished setting up the computer, people started to trickle into the gym. I typed:

while true; do mplayer *.avi; done;

After I verified the files were looping, I was on my merry way. Just thought I'd share.