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Create a tar archive using xz compression
Compress files or a directory to xz format. XZ has superior and faster compression than bzip2 in most cases. XZ is superior to 7zip format because it can save file permissions and other metadata data.

drop first column of output by piping to this
An advantage is that this doesn't modify remained string at all. One can change {0,1} with {0,n} to drop several columns

Delete empty directories recursively

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

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

Define words and phrases with google.
This function takes a word or a phrase as arguments and then fetches definitions using Google's "define" syntax. The "nl" and perl portion isn't strictly necessary. It just makes the output a bit more readable, but this also works: $define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?/dev/null;}

Using json.tool from the shell to validate and pretty-print

repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"

Delete all but the latest 5 files
yes 6 (tail from 6th line)

resume download using curl


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