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Copy uncommitted changes from remote git repository
Copy changed files from remote git repository, _including binary ones_, staged and unstaged alike. Note that this command doesn't handle deleted files properly.

Progress bar for MySQL import
Print out the progress of MySQL import using the pv command. Updates every second.

send DD a signal to print its progress
Sends the "USR1" signal every 1 second (-n 1) to a process called exactly "dd". The signal in some systems can be INFO or SIGINFO ... look at the signals list in: man kill

for all who don't have the watch command

Change the ownership of all files owned by one user.
Finds all files in /home owned by UID 1056 and changes to 2056.

Exclude svn directories with grep
exclude-dir option requires grep 2.5.3

Search for a string inside all files in the current directory
This is how I typically grep. -R recurse into subdirectories, -n show line numbers of matches, -i ignore case, -s suppress "doesn't exist" and "can't read" messages, -I ignore binary files (technically, process them as having no matches, important for showing inverted results with -v) I have grep aliased to "grep --color=auto" as well, but that's a matter of formatting not function.

Show available conversions
aliases on each line. i.e. txt2html: $recode ..HTML file.html txt to Base64: $recode ../b64 file.b64 and so on.

Execute a command at a given time

Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.
It's sometimes useful to strip the embedded fonts from a pdf, for importing into something like Inkscape. Be warned, this will increase the size of a pdf substantially. I tried this with only gs writing with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite but it doesn't seem to work, so I just pipe postscript output to ps2pdf for the same effect.


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