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remove repeated pairs of characters e.g. "xtxtxtxt" will become "xt"
This will remove repeated characters e.g. echo "xtxtxtxt" | sed -ru 's/(..)\1{2,}/\1/g' the output will just be "xt"

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"

find out how many days since given date
You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

Replace duplicate files by hardlinks

en/decrypts files in a specific directory
To decrypt the files replace "ccenrypt" with "ccdecrypt. ccrypt(1) must be installed. It uses the AES (Rijndael) block cipher. To make it handier create an alias.

Search for files in rpm repositorys. (Mandriva linux)
Look for an rpm that supplies a specific file that you don't yet have installed. extremely useful when you need something and don't know where it is.. or what its called. note: uses grep like syntax.

Erase a word

Find the package a command belongs to on Debian

Fast command-line directory browsing
Not really alternative, just giving a different behavior listing current directory if no directory given.

Comment out all lines in a file beginning with string


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