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faster version of ls *
I know its not much but is very useful in time consuming scripts (cron, rc.d, etc).

Create a new file

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

Create a local compressed tarball from remote host directory
The command uses ssh(1) to get to a remote host, uses tar(1) to archive a remote directory, prints the result to STDOUT, which is piped to gzip(1) to compress to a local file. In other words, we are archiving and compressing a remote directory to our local box.

Filter out all blank or commented (starting with #) lines

bash auto-complete your screen sessions
this bash command sets it so that when you type "screen ", it searches your running screens, and present valid auto-complete choices. The output is . Note: You must have programmable completion enabled. Check with "shopt progcomp", set with "shopt -s progcomp"

Convert all WMF images to SVG recursively ignoring file extension case
This assumes you have the package installed necessary for converting WMF files. On my Ubuntu box, this is libwmf-bin. I used this command, as libwmf is not on my wife's iMac, so I archived the directories containing the WMF files from OS X, ran them on my Ubuntu box, archived the resulting SVGs, and sent them back to her. Quick, simple and to the point. Searches directories recursively looking for extensions ignoring case. This is much more readable and clean than -exec for find. The while loop also gives further flexibility on complex logic. Also, although there is 'wmf2svg --auto', it expects lowercase extensions, and not uppercase. Because I want to ignore case, I need to use the -o option instead. Works in ZSH and BASH. Haven't tested in other shells.

Create the signature base string required for a Twitter stream feed
This is the SECOND command in a set for five that are needed for a Twitter stream feed. This command creates variable "b", the so-called "base string" required for oauth in Twitter stream feed requests. (The 256 char limit prevents giving it a better name) We use five environment variables created by a previous step: id, k1, once, ts and k3. The five environment variables are created in a separate command, please see my other commands. For more information on the signature base string, see dev.twitter.com/apps, click on any app (or create a new one) and then go to the "OAuth Tool" tab.

Extract tar.gz file with original permission
-x, --extract, --get extract files from an archive -p, --preserve-permissions, --same-permissions extract information about file permissions (default for superuser) -f, --file=ARCHIVE use archive file or device ARCHIVE -v, --verbose verbosely list files processed

geoip lookup


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