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Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

defragment files
Thanks to flatcap for optimizing this command. This command takes advantage of the ext4 filesystem's resistance to fragmentation. By using this command, files that were previously fragmented will be copied / deleted / pasted essentially giving the filesystem another chance at saving the file contiguously. ( unlike FAT / NTFS, the *nix filesystem always try to save a file without fragmenting it ) My command only effects the home directory and only those files with your R/W (read / write ) permissions. There are two issues with this command: 1. it really won't help, it works, but linux doesn't suffer much (if any ) fragmentation and even fragmented files have fast I/O 2. it doesn't discriminate between fragmented and non-fragmented files, so a large ~/ directory with no fragments will take almost as long as an equally sized fragmented ~/ directory The benefits i managed to work into the command: 1. it only defragments files under 16mb, because a large file with fragments isn't as noticeable as a small file that's fragmented, and copy/ delete/ paste of large files would take too long 2. it gives a nice countdown in the terminal so you know how far how much progress is being made and just like other defragmenters you can stop at any time ( use ctrl+c ) 3. fast! i can defrag my ~/ directory in 11 seconds thanks to the ramdrive powering the command's temporary storage bottom line: 1. its only an experiment, safe ( i've used it several times for testing ), but probably not very effective ( unless you somehow have a fragmentation problem on linux ). might be a placebo for recent windows converts looking for a defrag utility on linux and won't accept no for an answer 2. it's my first commandlinefu command

Output entire line once per unique value of the first column
Removes duplicates in the specified field/column while outputting entire lines. An elegant command for processing tab (or otherwise) delimited data.

decoding Active Directory date format
When Ldapsearch queries an Active directory server, all the dates are shown using a timestamp of 18 digits. This perl regexp decodes them in a more human friendly notation. 11644473600 corresponds to some microsoft epoch.

Convert Shell Text to Upper/Lower Case

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

for loop with leading zero in bash 3

resize all JPG images in folder and create new images (w/o overwriting)
Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs

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