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Target a specific column for pattern substitution
Awk replaces every instance of foo with bar in the 5th column only.

create an emergency swapfile when the existing swap space is getting tight
Create a temporary file that acts as swap space. In this example it's a 1GB file at the root of the file system. This additional capacity is added to the existing swap space.

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Colorful man
Colourful with vim regex finding goodness! Replace the 'man' with the page to be looked up. I actually have as a function in my .profile function vman { /usr/bin/man $* | /usr/bin/col -b | /usr/bin/iconv -c | view -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist nospell nonu' -

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Print all the lines between 10 and 20 of a file
Similarly, if you want to print from 10 to the end of line you can use: sed -n '10,$p' filename This is especially useful if you are dealing with a large file. Sometimes you just want to extract a sample without opening the entire file. Credit goes to wbx & robert at the comments section of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/348/get-line1000-from-text.#comment

Exclude grep from your grepped output of ps (alias included in description)
Surround the first letter of what you are grepping with square brackets and you won't have to spawn a second instance of grep -v. You could also use an alias like this (albeit with sed): alias psgrep='ps aux | grep $(echo $1 | sed "s/^\(.\)/[\1]/g")'

old man's advice

Extract tar content without leading parent directory
If archive has leading directory level same as archive name and you want to strip it, this command is for you.

Show a prettified list of nearby wireless APs


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