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Google text-to-speech in mp3 format
EDIT: command updated to support accented characters! Works in any of 58 google supported languages (some sound like crap, english is the best IMO). You get a mp3 file containing your query in spoken language. There is a limit of 100 characters for the "q" parameter, so be careful. The "tl" parameter contains target language.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

sort lines by length
making it "sound" more "natural" language like -- additionally sorting the longest words alphabetically: this approach is using: * to get at all lines of input * post-"for" structure * short-circuit-or in sort: if the lengths are the same, then sort alphabetically otherwise don't even evaluate the right hand side of the or * -C sets all input and ouput channels to utf8

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.

Generate a shortened URL with is.gd
Check the API. You shouldn't need sed. The print-newline at the end is to prevent zsh from inserting a % after the end-of-output. Also works with http://v.gd

Delete files older than..
This command will delete files i a given path (/dir_name) , which older than given time in days (-mtime +5 will delete files older than five days.

Search for packages, ranked by popularity
This will take the packages matching a given `apt-cache search` query (a collection of AND'd words or regexps) and tell you how popular they are. This is particularly nice for those times you have to figure out which solution to use for e.g. a PDF reader or a VNC client. Substitute "ubuntu.com" for "debian.org" if you want this to use Ubuntu's data instead. Everything else will work perfectly.

Listing directory content of a directory with a lot of entries
Ever wanted to get the directory content with 'ls' or 'find' and had to wait minutes until something was printed? Perl to the rescue. The one-liner above(redirected to a file) took less than five seconds to run in a directory with more man 2 million files. One can adapt it to e.g. delete files that match a certain pattern.

Remove color codes (special characters) with sed


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