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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 !!).

Synchronise a file from a remote server
You will be prompted for a password unless you have your public keys set-up.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Convert filenames from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8
Nothing advanced, it just finds filenames that are stored with ISO-8859-1 characters and and converts those into UTF-8. Recommended to use without the --notest flag first so you can see what will be changed.

Ping all hosts on 192.168.1.0/24
-b option takes the broadcast address.

Copy your ssh public key to a server from a machine that doesn't have ssh-copy-id
This one is a bit more robust -- the remote machine may not have an .ssh directory, and it may not have an authorized_keys file, but if it does already, and you want to replace your ssh public key for some reason, this will work in that case as well, without duplicating the entry.

For finding out if something is listening on a port and if so what the daemon is.

Wordwrap long text string using "\n"
I used this fragment with Imagemagick convert so that I can place long text strings in pictures. The "\n" gets converted to a true newline in the image. So this fragment uses fold command to wrap the line and then sed to convert newlines (and any trailing spaces on the line) to the text "\n"

convert a line to a space

force unsupported i386 commands to work on amd64
The above was done using the i386 flashplayer plugin, and was installed on a AMD64 machine running an AMD64 kernel and AMD64 programs. the resulting plugin install ultimately didn't work for swiftfox (but worked for iceweasel) without also covering it with a nspluginwrapper which took a bit of fenangaling to get to work (lots of apt-getting) but it is a nice feature to be able to trick installers that think you need i386 into running on a amd64, or at least attempting to run on amd64. Enjoy


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