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Slightly better compressed archives
Avoids creating useless directory entries in archive, and sorts files by (roughly) extension, which is likely to group similar files together for better compression. 1%-5% improvement.

Quick command line math
expr will give you a quick way to do basic math from the CLI. Make sure you escape things like * and leave a space between operators and digits.

Convert files from DOS line endings to UNIX line endings
The old dos2unix from sysutils has been deprecated on Debian systems to this tool.

Obtain last stock quote from google API with xmlstarlet

Run a command, redirecting output to a file, then edit the file with vim.
This is one of those 'nothing' shell functions ...which I use all the time. If the command contains spaces, it must be quoted, e.g. $ vimcmd 'svn diff' /tmp/svndiff.out If I want to keep the output of the command that I'm running, I use vimcmd. If I don't need to keep the output, I use this: $ vim

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Just use '-' to use STDIN as an additional input to 'cat'

check open ports without netstat or lsof

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
This captures traffic on a remote machine with tshark, sends the raw pcap data over the ssh link, and displays it in wireshark. Hitting ctrl+C will stop the capture and unfortunately close your wireshark window. This can be worked-around by passing -c # to tshark to only capture a certain # of packets, or redirecting the data through a named pipe rather than piping directly from ssh to wireshark. I recommend filtering as much as you can in the tshark command to conserve bandwidth. tshark can be replaced with tcpdump thusly: $ ssh root@example.com tcpdump -w - 'port !22' | wireshark -k -i -

shell function which allows you to tag files by creating symbolic links directories in a 'tags' folder.
shell function which allows you to tag files by creating symbolic links directories in a 'tags' folder. The tag function takes a tag name as its first argument, then a list of files which take that tag. The directory $HOME/tags/tagname will then hold symbolic links to each of the tagged files. This function was modified from bartonski's (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/10216) inspired by tmsu (found at https://bitbucket.org/oniony/tmsu/wiki/Home) with readlink function by flxndn (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/10222). Example: $ tag dog airedale.txt .shizturc weimeraner.pl This will create $HOME/tags/dog which contains symbolic links to airedale.txt .shizturc and weimeraner.pl

Reclaim standard in from the tty for a script that is in a pipeline
This will grab the controlling tty regardless of what STDOUT and STDERR are doing.


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