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Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Backup entire directory using rsync

Get duration of an audio file in seconds.
This is an alternative to #9131. ffmpeg didn't work on my .au files, though it did on the .wav ones. Also useful if you don't have ffmpeg but do have sox. Handily, sox already reports in seconds (decimal).

Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
Sometimes you're trying to read through an xml file to determine whats wrong with it and a tool had removed all the linebreaks. xmllint will go ahead and make it pretty for you.

Define shell variable HISTIGNORE so that comments (lines starting with #) appear in shell history
I was surprised to find that with RedHat bash, I could not find any comment lines (begining with #) in my bash shell history. Surprised because in Mageia Linux this works. It turns out that RedHat's bash will keep comment lines if in my .bashrc, I define: export HISTIGNORE=' cd "`*: PROMPT_COMMAND=?*?' Why have comment lines in shell history? It's a handy and convenient way to make proto-commands (to be completed later) and for storing brief text data that is searchable in shell history.

underscore to camelcase

Shell recorder with replay
If you provide the option -t to the script command and redirect stderr into a file, the timing information on what is going on on the terminal, is also stored. You can replay the session via the scriptreplay command, where you can also provide a speedup factor (see the man page for details). Great for demonstration purposes ...

Find the package that installed a command

Complex string encoding with sed
Pipe | avoid escaping occurences problems in using sed and make it easier to use

Convert wmv into avi


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