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Print current runlevel
Prints current runlevel and system start time. On older systems it also shows the last init state. Pretty useful on remote systems, pretty useless on local ones :)

ls -hog --> a more compact ls -l
I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog'

Expand shortened URLs
curl(1) is more portable than wget(1) across Unices, so here is an alternative doing the same thing with greater portability. This shell function uses curl(1) to show what site a shortened URL is pointing to, even if there are many nested shortened URLs. This is a great way to test whether or not the shortened URL is sending you to a malicious site, or somewhere nasty that you don't want to visit. The sample output is from: $ expandurl http://t.co/LDWqmtDM

list files recursively by size

Create a bash script from last n commands
Uses history to get the last n+1 commands (since this command will appear as the most recent), then strips out the line number and this command using sed, and appends the commands to a file.

extract email adresses from some file (or any other pattern)
Simply more email-adresses matched

Find default gateway

Speed up builds and scripts, remove duplicate entries in $PATH. Users scripts are oftern bad: PATH=/apath:$PATH type of thing cause diplicate.

Merge some PDF files into a single one


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