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tar the current directory wihtout the absolute path
tars the current directory (and its children) in an archive of the same name (plus ".tar" :)) in the parent directory without the absolute path, so that when the archive is extracted, only the current directory name is created for the path. Assumes bash/zsh.

Use a var with more text only if it exists
See "Parameter Expansion" in the bash manpage. They refer to this as "Use Alternate Value", but we're including the var in the at alternative.

Get all IPs via ifconfig
The initial version of this command also outputted extra empty lines, so it went like this: 192.168.166.48 127.0.0.1 This happened on Ubuntu, i haven't tested on anything else.

Use result of the last command
\$ which python /usr/bin/python \$ ll `!!` lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-11-08 22:01 /usr/bin/python -> python2.6

Print all lines between two line numbers
This command uses awk(1) to print all lines between two known line numbers in a file. Useful for seeing output in a log file, where the line numbers are known. The above command will print all lines between, and including, lines 3 and 6.

Print macOS current power delivery max wattage
Print the max wattage of the current power draw source for a Mac. Note that the current amount of watts drawn may be lower, particularly if a high-wattage adapter is plugged into a Mac that has a full battery.

Find your graphics chipset
Displays only the VGA adapter/chipset being used for the graphics. In this case, it gave me the "M22" and "Mobility Radeon x300" that I needed to research a graphics issue I was having.

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Find all file extension in current dir.

find an unused unprivileged TCP port
Not really better - just different ;) There's probably a really simple solution out there somewhere...


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