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Move all images in a directory into a directory hierarchy based on year, month and day based on exif information
This command would move the file "dir/image.jpg" with a "DateTimeOriginal" of "2005:10:12 16:05:56" to "2005/10/12/image.jpg". This is a literal example from the exiftool man page, very useful for classifying photo's. The possibilities are endless.

Batch Convert SVG to PNG (in parallel)
Use GNU Parallel: short, easy to read, and will run one job per core.

Synchronize date and time with a server over ssh
Shorter, easier to remember version of cmd#7636 NTP is better, but there are situations where it can't be used. In those cases, you can do this to sync the local time to a server.

search for a file in PATH

Get a list of the top 10 heaviest tables in your mysql database - useful for performance diagnostics

Copy files for backup storage
Backup a whole directory copying only updated files.

Replace spaces in a file with hyphens

Hold off any screensavers/timeouts
Moves the mouse 1 pixel down and to the right, then immediately back again, every 4 minutes. This keeps screensavers from turning on. I have used this extensively and I've never even noticed the mouse movement because it is so subtle.

Shows users and 'virtual users' on your a unix-type system
Shows a list of users that currently running processes are executing as. YMMV regarding ps and it's many variants. For example, you might need: $ ps -axgu | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort -u

extract element of xml
Prints the value of a XML node rather than the entire node.


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