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Convert Youtube videos to MP3
youtube-dl has this functionality built in. If you're running an older version of youtube-dl, you can update it using `youtube-dl -U` (although if you have an older version, it probably doesn't download youtube videos anyway.) youtube-dl --help will show you other options that may come in useful.

Empty a file
The downside of output redirection is that you need permissions. So something like $ > file won't play nicely w/ sudo. You'd need to do something like $ bash -c '> file' instead, you could go w/ $ sudo truncate -s0 file

Displays the version of the Adobe Flash plugin installed
This is for Debian, simply change the path if your Flash plugin is installed elsewhere.

copy remote ssh session output to local clipboard
ssh from local to remote and pipe output of file to the local clipboard

Send your terminfo to another machine
I frequently use this trick to send my terminal settings to HPUX and older RHEL systems. This is due to the fact that terminfo support for rxvt-unicode (my preferred terminal app) does not exist on many older Linux and Unices.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

Perl one-liner to determine number of days since the Unix epoch
There are some environments that use this value for password and account expiration. It's helpful to be able to quickly determine the number of days since the Unix epoch (dse) when working directly with the configuration files as an administrator.

Batch Convert SVG to PNG (in parallel)
Use GNU Parallel: short, easy to read, and will run one job per core.

VIM: when Ctrl-D and Ctrl-U only scroll one line, reset to default
Resets the scroll parameter to the default (half the rows in the current window). The scroll parameter can be inadvertently set to 1, e..g., if you type '1 Ctrl-D' or '1 Ctrl-U' in normal mode.

Show git branches by date - useful for showing active branches
This fixes a bug found in the other scripts which fail when a branch has the same name as a file or directory in the current directory.


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