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Mount important virtual system directories under chroot'ed directory
The command is useful when, e.g., booting an existing system with a rescue or installation CD where you need to chroot into the hard-disk and be able to do stuff which accesses kernel info (e.g. when installing Ubuntu desktop with LVM2 you need to mount and chroot the hard disk from a shell window in order to install packages and run initramfs inside chroot). The command assumes that /mnt/xxx is where the chroot'ed environment's root file system on the hard disk is mounted.

Convert text to picture
generates a picture file with the text. Some other samples in: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/text/

Get your external IP address if your machine has a DNS entry

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"

Toggle between directories
switch to previous directory or toggle

download the contents of a remote folder in the current local folder

Say something out loud
Whatever arguments you pass will be spoken out loud. (Put it in a script or shell function.)

echo something backwards
NAME rev - reverse lines of a file or files SYNOPSIS rev [file ...] DESCRIPTION The rev utility copies the specified files to the standard output, reversing the order of characters in every line. If no files are specified, the standard input is read. AVAILABILITY The rev command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.


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