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Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Pick a random line from a file

cloning partition tables under Solaris

Outputs a 10-digit random number

Read almost everything (Changelog.gz, .tgz, .deb, .png, .pdf, etc, etc....)
It allows customizing by means of lesspipe. You need to write a ~/.lessfilter script and put this into your ~/.bashrc: eval $(lesspipe) export LESS=-r

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

Mac OS-X-> copy and paste things to and from the clipboard from the shell
Copies whatever is piped to the pbcopy command to the clipboard. pbpaste ... well pastes whats on the clipboard.

Copy files for backup storage
Backup a whole directory copying only updated files.

Duplicating service runlevel configurations from one server to another.
And then to complete the task: Go to target host; $ssh host Turn everything off: $for i in `chkconfig --list | fgrep :on | awk '{print $1}'` ; do chkconfig --level 12345 $i off; done Create duplicate config: $while read line; do chkconfig --level $line on; done < foo

Currency Conversion
eg: currency_convert 1 usd inr


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