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Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Use the arguments used in the last command
Very basic, but who knows.. mkdir !$ should work too, only uses 'the last' argument. !-2 executes cd Desktop/Notes again. More tips in 'man history'

move cursor to beginning of command line
Pressing Ctrl combined with 'a' will move the cursor to the beginning of the command under bash (other shells?). I used to do this after arrowing up for the last command, then typing 'sudo ' to run the last command as root, but of course the all time greatest command here `sudo !!` is more succinct. Still Ctrl+A can be very useful when you want to edit something at/close to the beginning of the command line.

Find the files that contain a certain term
Simple use of find and grep to recursively search a directory for files that contain a certain term.

make directory with current date

Show a config file without comments
Shows a file without comments (at least those starting by #) - removes empty lines - removes lines starting by # or "some spaces/tabs then #'" Useful when you want to quickly see what you have to customize on a freshly installed application without reading the comments that sometimes are a full 1000 lines documentation :) While posting, I saw this http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1041/display-contents-of-a-file-wo-any-comments-or-blank-lines But it's dirty and incomplete, to my mind My original goal was to remove lines like "\t*#" but I can't figure out how to do a egrep '\t' on a command-line. Two workarounds if needed: $egrep -v 'press control + V then TAB then #' /your/file or $egrep -v -f some_file /your/file #where some_file contains what you want to exclude, example a really inserted TAB

Random unsigned integer
works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.

List only locally modified files with CVS

convert wav files to ogg
cd to the folder containing the wav files and convert them all to ogg format. in my sample output i use the -a and -l flags to set the author and album title. to get the oggenc program in ubuntu linux run: sudo apt-get install oggenc

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.


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