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Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Force wrap all text to 80 columns in Vim
This is assuming that you're editing some file that has not been wrapped at 80 columns, and you want it to be wrapped. While in Vim, enter ex mode, and set the textwidth to 80 columns: $ :set textwidth=80 Then, press: $ gg to get to the top of the file, and: $ gqG to wrap every line from the top to the bottom of the file at 80 characters. Of course, this will lose any indentation blocks you've setup if typing up some source code, or doing type setting. You can make modifications to this command as needed, as 'gq' is the formatting command you want, then you could send the formatting to a specific line in the file, rather than to the end of the file. $ gq49G Will apply the format from your current cursor location to the 49th row. And so on.

Colorized grep in less
Get your colorized grep output in less(1). This involves two things: forcing grep to output colors even though it's not going to a terminal and telling less to handle those properly.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

GZip all files in a directory separately
It gzip each file in a directory separately

Kill XMMS for a cron job

Buffer in order to avoir mistakes with redirections that empty your files
A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file. It can be easily avoided because of : 1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file" 2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file. Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

concat multiple videos into one (and add an audio track)
This is an extract from a larger script which formats the video for DVD. The videos I use have no audio track so I need to add one. Tweak as you like...

Extract ip addresses with sed
Extracts ip addressess from file using sed. Uses a tag(ip) to grep the IP lines after extracting. Must be a way to just output regex matched on sed.

Check if a string is into a variable
Returns true (0) if the string is into $var, or false (1) if not.


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