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

identify exported sonames in a path
This provides a list of shared object names (sonames) that are exported by a given tree. This is usually useful to make sure that a given required dependency (NEEDED entry) is present in a firmware image tree. The shorter (usable) version for it would be $ scanelf -RBSq -F "+S#f" But I used the verbose parameters in the command above, for explanation.

cycle through everything sox knows how to read, playing only the first three seconds
I wasted two hours reading the sox documentation and searching on the web for the format of some obscure fscking sound sample, and then finally came up with this. This plays only the first three seconds of your unknown formatted sound file using every one of sox's built-in filetypes. If you don't get an exact match, you may get close. . I could not fit every single type in and keep it under 127 characters, so you will have to replace "..." with the full list obtainable by `$ sox --help` (or try `Show sample output`) . note: /usr/bin/play should be linked to sox on most systems.

Using Git, stage all manually deleted files.

Are there any words in the English language that use at least half of the alphabet without repeating any letters?
This is the most straightforward approach: first regexp limits dictionary file to words with thirteen or more characters, second regexp discards any words that have a letter repeated. (Bonus challenge: Try doing it in a single regexp!)

list files recursively by size

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Re-emerge all ebuilds with missing files (Gentoo Linux)
Revised approach to and3k's version, using pipes and read rather than command substitution. This does not require fiddling with IFS when paths have whitespace, and does not risk hitting command-line size limits. It's less verbose on the missing files, but it stops iterating at the first file that's missing, so it should be definitely faster. I expanded all the qlist options to be more self-describing.

Update twitter from command line without reveal your password
Update twitter from commandline, without revealing your password and without having to type it interactively. You 'll need to put a line "machine twitter.com login TWITTERUSER password TWITTERPASS" in $HOME/.netrc and better chmod 600 that file.

show the date every rpm was installed
the newest rpms are at the top; individual packages can also be queried this way: rpm --last -q package


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