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find and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir
A quick way to find and delete empty dirs, it starts in the current working directory. If you do find . -empty -type d you will see what could be removed, or to a test run.

Tail a log and replace according to a sed pattern
Tails a log and replaces it line-by-line according to whatever you want to replace. Useful if the file writing to the log can't be modified, so you need to modify its output instead.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Extract audio from Mythtv recording to Rockbox iPod using ffmpeg
There are some pretty good live performances on late night TV. With Mythtv I record David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and Conan nightly all in HD from over the air broadcasts. If I find a live performance I like I copy it to my Rockboxed iPod using this command. The Rockbox firmware knows how to downmix 5.1 audio. The command above extracts the audio from the video starting at 58 minutes and 15 seconds. It ends at the end of the file since this was the last performance of the recording. The command creates an ac3 file. I copy the ac3 file to my Rockbox iPod and rock on.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Detect encoding of a text file
This command gives you the charset of a text file, which would be handy if you have no idea of the encoding.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Show memory usage of all docker / lxc containers

Run a command multiple times with different subcommands
it's nice to be able to use the command `ls program.{h,c,cpp}`. This expands to `ls program.h program.c program.cpp`. Note: This is a text expansion, not a shell wildcard type expansion that looks at matching file names to calculate the expansion. More details at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bash-brace-expansion I often run multiple commands (like apt-get) one after the other with different subcommands. Just for fun this wraps the whole thing into a single line that uses brace expansion.


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