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Display which distro is installed
Works on Ubuntu

Redefine the cd command's behavior
Often, the very next command after the cd command is 'ls', so why not combine them?. Tested on a Red Hat derivative and Mac OS X Leopard Update: changed ${1:-$HOME} to "${@:-$HOME}" to accomodate directories with spaces in the names

Backup file, create dir and set perms in one shot
Prior to working on/modifying a file, use the 'install -m' command which can both copy files, create directories, and set their permissions at the same time. Useful when you are working in the public_html folder and need to keep the cp'd file hidden.

Compare an archive with filesystem
and you quickly know the files you changed

Hide comments
Hide comments and empty lines, included XML comments,

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

Clear history

Text graphing ping output filter
Nasty perl one-liner that provides a sparkline of ping times. If you want a different history than the last 30, just put that value in. It (ab)uses unicode to draw the bars, inspired by https://github.com/joemiller/spark-ping . It's not the most bug-free piece of code, but what it lacks in robustness it makes up for in capability. :) If anyone has any ideas on how to make it more compact or better, I'd love to hear them. I included a ping to google in the command just as an example (and burned up 10 chars doing it!). You should use it with: $ ping example.com | $SPARKLINE_PING_COMMAND

Grep log between range of minutes
Returns logs between HH:M[Mx-My], for example, between 13:40 and 13:45.


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