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The `export` is unnecessary if it's only applicable to the one command.

Exclude .svn, .git and other VCS junk for a pristine tarball
~$ tar --version tar (GNU tar) 1.20

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX

find which of the zip files contains the file you're searching for
This command find which of your zip (or jar) files (when you have lots of them) contains a file you're searching for. It's useful when you have a lot of zip (or jar) files and need to know in which of them the file is archived. It's most common with .jar files when you have to know which of the .jar files contains the java class you need. To find in jar files, you must change "zip" to "jar" in the "find" command. The [internal file name] must be changed to the file name you're searching that is archived into one of the zip/jar files. Before run this command you must step into the directory that contains the zip or jar files.

Resize an image to at least a specific resolution
This command will resize an image (keeping the aspect ratio) to a specific resolution, meaning the resulting image will never be smaller than this resolution. For example, if we have a 2048x1000 image, the output would be 1229x600, not 1024x600 or 1024x500. Same thing for the height, if the image is 2000x1200, the output would be 1024x614.

reclaim your window titlebars (in ubuntu lucid)

start a VNC server for another user

Clean way of re-running bash startup scripts.
This replaces the current bash session with a new bash session, run as an interactive non-login shell... useful if you have changed /etc/bash.bashrc, or ~/.bashrc If you have changed a startup script for login shells, use $ exec bash -l Suitable for re-running /etc/profile, ~/.bash_login and ~/.profile. edit: chinmaya points out that $ env - HOME=$HOME TERM=$TERM bash -s "exec bash -l" will clear any shell variables which have been set... since this verges on unwieldy, might want to use $ alias bash_restart='env - HOME=$HOME TERM=$TERM bash -s "exec bash -l"'

give a binary the ability to open ports below 1024 as non root user
Binding a server to privileged port on Linux w/o running as root This is applicable to any service using privileged ports (< 1024), for instance to run a HTTP server on port 80 or a LDAP directory server on port 389 for example.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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