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Define words and phrases with google.
This function takes a word or a phrase as arguments and then fetches definitions using Google's "define" syntax. The "nl" and perl portion isn't strictly necessary. It just makes the output a bit more readable, but this also works: $define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?/dev/null;}

Tweak system files without invoking a root shell
only for sudo-style systems. Use this construct instead of I/O re-directors ``>'' or ``>>'' because sudo only elevates the commands and *not* the re-directors. ***warning: remember that the `tee` command will clobber file contents unless it is given the ``-a'' argument Also, for extra security, the "left" command is still run unprivileged.

Recursive find and replace file extension / suffix (mass rename files)
Find recursively all files in ~/Notes with the extension '.md' and pipe that via xargs to rename command, which will replace every '.md' to '.txt' in this example (existing files will not be overwritten).

count of down available ips
avoid wc overload ;)

show lines that appear in both file1 and file2

List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location
Tested on MacOS and GNU/Linux. It works in dirs containing files starting with '-'. It runs 'du' only once. It sorts according to size. It treats 1K=1000 (and not 1024)

Grab just the title of a youtube video
There's another version on here that uses GET but some people don't have lwp-request, so here's an alternative. It's also a little shorter and should work with most youtube URLs since it truncates at the first &

A function to output a man page as a pdf file
Tested on Fedora 12. This function will take a man page and convert it to pdf, saving the output to the current working directory. In Gnome, you can then view the output with "gnome-open file.pdf", or your favorite pdf viewer.

List processes sorted by CPU usage

Find broken symlinks
This is much safer than using -L, because it will not follow links that point to places outside the target directory subtree (CWD, in this case). See here for explanation: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/38691/9382


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