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Watch the progress of 'dd'
Pressing ctrl-t will display the progress

Optimize PDF documents

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Turns hidden applications transparent in the Mac OS X dock.
In Mac OS X, pressing Command+H will hide an application. While that application's windows vanish, there is no other visual feedback, meaning there is no immediate distinction between an application running with no windows open and a hidden application. This command turns hidden applications' icons transparent, providing a clear and obvious distinction. Change YES to NO to restore the previous functionality.

a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
First argument: string to put a box around. Second argument: character to use for box (default is '=') Same as command #4962, cleaned up, shortened, and more efficient. Now a ' * ' can be used as the box character, and the variables get unset so they don't mess with anything else you might have. They marked c++ as a function for this command, but I'm not sure why. Must be a bug.

Clean apt-get and gpg cache and keys
Cleans apt-get and gpg cache and keys

Clean up after a poorly-formed tar file
These days, most software distributed in tar files will just contain a directory at the top level, but some tar files don't have this and can leave you with a mess of files in the current folder if you blindly execute $ tar zxvf something.tar.gz This command can help you clean up after such a mistake. However, note that this has the potential to do bad things if someone has been *really* nasty with filenames.

Using vim to save and run your python script.
This will save and execute your python script every time your press the F5 function key. It can also be added to your .vimrc: autocmd BufRead *.py nmap :w^M:!python % NOTE: the ^M is not just caret-M, it can be created by type: ctrl-v ctrl-m

Open Sublime-text in current directory

list human readable files
include in the list human readable hidden files too: $ file .* *|grep 'ASCII text'|sort -rk2 more reliable command: $ ls|xargs file|grep 'ASCII text'|sort -rk2 and include hidden files: $ ls -a|xargs file|grep 'ASCII text'|sort -rk2


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