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sort a JSON blob
For situations where you keep JSON in a VCS and you want your diffs to be sane, such as within a Chef configuration repo.

Remote screenshot
Say if you're logged into a remote system via ssh and this system has an x window system, but yet you still want a screen shot of what's going on graphically. This will do it for you. :-)

cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"

extract element of xml

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

Get memory total from /proc/meminfo in Gigs

Get the Nth argument of the last command (handling spaces correctly)
Bash's history expansion character, "!", has many features, including "!:" for choosing a specific argument (or range of arguments) from the history. The gist is any number after !: is the number of the argument you want, with !:1 being the first argument and !:0 being the command. See the sample output for a few examples. For full details search for "^HISTORY EXPANSION" in the bash(1) man page.    Note that this version improves on the previous function in that it handles arguments that include whitespace correctly.

Find artist and title of a music cd, UPC code given (first result only)
I like curl better than wget, I just think that curl -s is a lot simpler than wget ... see I forget what you even have to do to get wget to pipe it's output Anyway, all in one sed command as "requested"

Dump sqlite database to plain text format
If you want edit your sqlite database in any uft8 supported editor, you can dump whole sqlite database to plain text.

retab in vim, tab to space or space to tab, useful in python
usage: :[rang]ret[!][tabstop value] python is indent sensitive, after command :set list you may see your codes are mixed with tab and space ret can help you to convert space to tab or tab to space


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