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a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
"killall -USR1 dd" does not work in OS X for me. However, sending INFO instead of USR1 works.

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

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.

Know which version dpkg/apt considers more recent
Compares two versions with dpkg. It is not always obvious what version dpkg/apt will consider to be more recent. Operators include the following : * These treat an empty version as earlier than any version: lt le eq ne ge gt. * These treat an empty version as later than any version: lt-nl le-nl ge-nl gt-nl. * These are provided only for compatibility with control file syntax: < > >. This command doesn't output anything. It only returns with status 0 or 1, hence the echo "y" || echo "n" to get an output.

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

Delicious search with human readable output
You can install filterous with $ sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev; sudo easy_install -U filterous

download newest adminer and rename to it's version accordingly
If the version already downloaded. it will not download again

Regex to remove HTML-Tags from a file
This regular expression removes all HTML-Tags from the file.

Download and extract a *tar.gz file with curl.


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