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Create a tar of directory structure only

Undo several commits by committing an inverse patch.
Use this to make a new commit that "softly" reverts a branch to some commit (i.e. squashes the history into an inverse patch). You can review the changes first by doing the diff alone.

take execution time of several commands
The last ; is important. example: time { rm -rf /folder/bar && mkdir -p /folder/bar ; echo "done" ; } command is a bash builtin

Watch Al Jazeera Livestream directly in mplayer #jan25
One cannot call the high quality livestream directly, but command this gives you a session ID and the high quality stream. #egypt #jan25

Takes an html file and outputs plain text from it

Matrix Style
Another wall matrix :)

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.

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...

Convert text to lowercase
Usage: lower [STRING]...

display date of last time a process was started in `date` format
STARTED Mon Oct 18 04:02:01 2010


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