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Clean up display when the bash prompt is displayed
This will cause bash to fix a garbled terminal before the prompt is printed. For example, if you cat a file with nonprintable character sequences, the terminal sometimes ends up in a mode where it only prints line drawing characters. This sequence will return the terminal to the standard character set after every command.

remote-pbzip2 and transfer a directory to local file

Rename files in batch

List upcoming events on google calendar
Requires googlecl (http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) Even better when you wrap this in a script and allow the --date=STRING to be $1. Then you can type: whatson "next Thursday" The date string for UNIX date is very flexible. You can also add --cal "[regex]" to the end for multiple calendars.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Create a temporary file
To create directory, use: $ tempdir=$(/bin/mktemp -d)

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Repeat a command until stopped
In this case it runs the command 'curl localhost:3000/site/sha' waiting the amount of time in sleep, ie: 1 second between runs, appending each run to the console. This works well for any command where the output is less than your line width This is unlike watch, because watch always clears the display.

Run a command that has been aliased without the alias
Most distributions alias cp to 'cp -i', which means when you attempt to copy into a directory that already contains the file, cp will prompt to overwrite. A great default to have, but when you mean to overwrite thousands of files, you don't want to sit there hitting [y] then [enter] thousands of times. Enter the backslash. It runs the command unaliased, so as in the example, cp will happily overwrite existing files much in the way mv works.

Identify differences between directories (possibly on different servers)
This can be much faster than downloading one or both trees to a common servers and comparing the files there. After, only those files could be copied down for deeper comparison if needed.


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