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ls -qaltr # list directory in chronological order, most recent files at end of list
I find it very handy to be able to quickly see the most recently modified/created files in a directory. Note that the "q" option will reveal any files with non-printable characters in their filename.

Remove all leading and trailing spaces or tabs from all lines of a text file
Bash only, no sed, no awk. Multiple spaces/tabs if exists INSIDE the line will be preserved. Empty lines stay intact, except they will be cleaned from spaces and tabs if any available.

Generate a random password 30 characters long

Rename all .jpeg and .JPG files to .jpg

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Screencast of your PC Display with mp4 output
Since ffmpeg on Ubuntu is deprecated, now there is avconv. Please note that the screen area here is set with a predefined format "-s wxga" that is corresponding to "-s 1366x768") There is also the option to add a title in the metadata of the resulting video.

list files recursively by size

Download all files from podcast RSS feed
Neither of the others worked for me. This does.

shutdown pc in 4 hours without needing to keep terminal open / user logged in.
From the 'disown' man page: disown prevents the current shell from sending a HUP signal to each of the given jobs when the current shell terminates a login session.

Best option set for 7zip compression of database dumps or generic text files
These re the best option combination that works fine for compressing my database dumps. It's possible that there are another option or value that might improve the compression ratio, by these are the ones that worked, the syntax for 7zr it's a little messy...


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