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Download a new release of a program that you already have very quickly
Zsync is an implementation of rsync over HTTP that allows updating of files from a remote Web server without requiring a full download. For example, if you already have a Debian alpha, beta or RC copy downloaded, zsync can just download the updated bits of the new release of the file from the server. This requires the distributor of the file to have created a zsync build control file (using zsyncmake).

Replace multiple file extensions with a single extension
The above is just a prove of concept based around the nested bash substitution. This could be useful in situations where you're in a directory with many filetypes but you only want to convert a few. $ for f in *.bmp *.jpg *.tga; do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done or you can use ls | egrep to get more specific... but be warned, files with spaces will cause a ruckus with expansion but the bash for loop uses a space delimited list. $ for f in $(ls | egrep "bmp$|jpg$|tga$"); do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done I'm guessing some people will still prefer doing it the sed way but I thought the concept of this one was pretty neat. It will help me remember bash substitutions a little better :-P

enable all bash completions in gentoo

tar via network

Create a tar archive using 7z compression
Using 7z to create archives is OK, but when you use tar, you preserve all file-specific information such as ownership, perms, etc. If that's important to you, this is a better way to do it.

In-Place search/replace with datestamped backup
Does an in situ search-replace but leaves a datestamped backup. A variation with more precision: sed -i.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S 's/pattern/replace' [filename]

make sure you don't add large file to your repository

Check if filesystem hangs
When a fs hangs and you've just one console, even # ls could be a dangerous command. Simply put a trailing "&" and play safe

Recursively execute command on directories (.svn, permissions, etc)
The above command will set the GID bit on all directories named .svn in the current directory recursively. This makes the group ownership of all .svn folders be the group ownership for all files created in that folder, no matter the user. This is useful for me as the subversion working directory on my server is also the live website and needs to be auto committed to subversion every so often via cron as well as worked on by multiple users. Setting the GID bit on the .svn folders makes sure we don't have a mix of .svn metadata created by a slew of different users.

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file


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