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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

Create a quick back-up copy of a file
Uses shell expansion to create a back-up called file.txt.bak

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Use top to monitor only all processes with the same name fragment 'foo'
top accecpts a comma separated list of PIDs.

How to backup hard disk timely?
'data' is the directory to backup, 'backup' is directory to store snapshots. Backup files on a regular basis using hard links. Very efficient, quick. Backup data is directly available. Same as explained here : http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html in one line. Using du to check the size of your backups, the first backup counts for all the space, and other backups only files that have changed.

Recursively unrar into dir containing archive
From the cwd, recursively find all rar files, extracting each rar into the directory where it was found, rather than cwd. A nice time saver if you've used wget or similar to mirror something, where each sub dir contains an rar archive. Its likely this can be tuned to work with multi-part archives where all parts use ambiguous .rar extensions but I didn't test this. Perhaps unrar would handle this gracefully anyway?

Connect to google talk through ssh by setting your IM client to use the localhost 5432 port
If your firewall or proxy at your location prevents connection to a particular host or port, you can use ssh to tunnel to your home server and do it there instead.

Remove git branches that do not have a remote tracking branch anymore

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"

Number of CPU's in a system
this works for a Linux based system, other UNIX systems may have other way(s) to check the number of CPUs.


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