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Convert a file from ISO-8859-1 (or whatever) to UTF-8 (or whatever)
I use it sometimes when I work on a french file transferred from a windows XP to a Debian-UTF8 system. Those are not correctly displayed: ? ? ? and so on $man tcs # for all charsets

Log your internet download speed
This will log your internet download speed. You can run $gnuplot -persist

BourneShell: Go to previous directory
cd - would return to the previous directory of your cd command. NB: previous dir is always stored in $OLDPWD variable.

The wisdom of Cave Johnson
There's been a similar Futurama thing around for a while, which grabs a quote from the /. headers [curl -Ism3 slashdot.org | egrep "^X-(F|B|L)" | cut -d \- -f 2- | fmt -w $(tput cols)]. Same deal, but more likely to stop working when someone forgets to pay the bill on the domain. Until then: Cave Johnson!

another tweet function
This version of tweet() doesn't require you to put quotes around the body of your tweet... it also prompts you for password. It will still barf on a '!' character.

Unbelievable Shell Colors, Shading, Backgrounds, Effects for Non-X
I've been using linux for almost a decade and only recently discovered that most terminals like putty, xterm, xfree86, vt100, etc., support hundreds of shades of colors, backgrounds and text/terminal effects. This simply prints out a ton of them, the output is pretty amazing. If you use non-x terminals all the time like I do, it can really be helpful to know how to tweak colors and terminal capabilities. Like: $ echo $'\33[H\33[2J'

Create a listing of all possible permissions and their octal representation.

disassemble binary shellcode
The options -b binary and -m are needed for disassembling raw machine code when it is not part of a full binary executable with proper headers.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Using json.tool from the shell to validate and pretty-print


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