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Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

Backup all databases in a MySQL container

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

fix broken permissions

pushd rotates the stack so that the second directory comes at the top.
'pushd +1' is equivalent to 'pushd'. Can be 'pushd +3' or more generaly 'pushd +N'. Can also be 'pushd -N'. More description in 'man bash'.

Download last file from index of

Find UTF-8 text files misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1 due to Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard.
Character: "?" is the Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard. Specifically it is the hex bytes EF BB BF, which form the UTF-8 representation of the BOM, misinterpreted as ISO 8859/1 text instead of UTF-8.

Play online music videos in terminal
pvl 'link1' 'link2' 'link3' Play Youtube, Vimeo, etc links without visual elements. Great for music videos when you just want the audio. You can control mplayer with this! Hit Ctrl-C twice to exit (if you're playing multiple files)

Copy a file to a new directory created on the fly
You need to cp, mv, scp, ..., some files around from one place to another, and after having laboriously typed out the source path, you remember that the destination directory doesn't yet exist, and so the command will fail. So rather than killing the command line and starting over, just interpolate the results of creating the directory and echo its name. You could DRY this with a for; do; done, but that may be more trouble than it's worth.

Use Cygwin to talk to the Windows clipboard
I spent a bunch of time yesterday looking for the xsel package in Cygwin- turns out you can use the /dev/clipboard device to do the same thing.


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