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Convert a file from ISO-8859-1 (or whatever) to UTF-8 (or whatever)
I use it sometimes when I work on a french file transferred from a windows XP to a Debian-UTF8 system. Those are not correctly displayed: ? ? ? and so on $man tcs # for all charsets

Create the oauth token required for a Twitter stream feed
This is the THIRD in a set of five commands. See my other commands for the previous two. This step creates the oauth 1.0 token as explained in http://oauth.net/core/1.0/ The token is required for a Twitter filtered stream feed (and almost all Twitter API calls) This token is simply an encrypted version of your base string. The encryption key used is your hmac. The last part of the command scans the Base64 token string for '+', '/', and '=' characters and converts them to percentage-hex escape codes. (URI-escapeing). This is also a good example of where the $() syntax of Bash command substitution fails, while the backtick form ` works - the right parenthesis in the case statement causes a syntax error if you try to use the $() syntax here. See my previous two commands step1 and step2 to see how the base string variable $b and hmac variable $hmac are generated.

execute your commands hiding secret bits from history records
$ wget --user=username --password="$password" http://example.org/ Instead of hiding commands entirely from history, I prefer to use "read" to put the password into a variable, and then use that variable in the commands instead of the password. Without the "-e" and "-s" it should work in any bourne-type shell, but the -s is what makes sure the password doesn't get echoed to the screen at all. (-e makes editing work a bit better)

Show line numbers in a text file

Most used command

Create a new file

Run entire shell script as root
Placing sudo in the shebang line of a shell script runs the entire thing as root. Useful for scripts designed to, e.g. automate system upgrades or package manager wrappers — makes prepending everything with sudo no longer necessary

Postpone a command [zsh]
When writing on the command line of zsh, by pressing Alt+q the command will be cleaned, and you can insert another one. The command you were writing will be recorder, and pasted on the prompt immediately after the "interrupting" command is inserted.

Search for a word in less
Although less behaves more or less like vim in certain aspects, the vim regex for word boundaries (\< and \>) do not work in less. Instead, use \b to denote a word boundary. Therefore, if you want to search for, say, the word "exit", but do not want to search for exiting, exits, etc., then surround "exit" with \b. This is useful if you need to search for specific occurrences of a keyword or command. \b can also be used at just the beginning and end, if needed.

Copy a directory recursively without data/files


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