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Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Create a backup of the file.
It will create a backup of the filename. The advantage is that if you list the folder the backups will be sorted by date. The command works on any unix in bash.

Nice info browser
pinfo package provide a nice info alternative based on ncurses.

Update twitter with curl
Same as below, but no quotes are necessary when twitting more than one word

Test disk I/O
Especially useful to gauge the performance of a VPS.

Dump dvd from a different machine onto this one.
You can use this to directly dump from machine A (with dvd drive) to machine B (without dvd drive) . I used this to copy dvd using my friend's machine to my netbook. Above command is to be issued on machine B. Advantages : 1) No wasting time dumping first to machine A and then copying to Machine B. 2) You dont need to use space on Machine A. In fact, this will work even when Machine A doesnt have enough hdd space to dump the DVD. Use -C ssh option on slow networks (enables compression). you can replace "dd if=/dev/dvd" with any ripping command as long as it spews the iso to stdout.

Put split files back together, without a for loop
After splitting a file, put them all back together a lot faster then doing $cat file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 > mainfile or $for i in {0..5}; do cat file$i > mainfile; done When splitting, be sure to do split -d for getting numbers instead of letters

Unite pdf files
pdfunite is a part of the poppler-utils. poppler-utils package is only 150KB. The alternative - pdftk package is 14MB! Install poppler-utils if you need simple pdf operation commands like unite, separate, info, text/html conversions

floating point operations in shell scripts
using bc is for sissies. dc is much better :-D Polish notation will rule the world...

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