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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;}

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Find the package that installed a command

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

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.

List all global top level modles, then remove ALL npm packages with xargs

output the contents of a file removing any empty lines including lines which contain only spaces or tabs.

convert all flac files in a folder to mp3 files with a bitrate of 192 kbps

Duplicate installed packages from one machine to the other (RPM-based systems)

force unsupported i386 commands to work on amd64
The above was done using the i386 flashplayer plugin, and was installed on a AMD64 machine running an AMD64 kernel and AMD64 programs. the resulting plugin install ultimately didn't work for swiftfox (but worked for iceweasel) without also covering it with a nspluginwrapper which took a bit of fenangaling to get to work (lots of apt-getting) but it is a nice feature to be able to trick installers that think you need i386 into running on a amd64, or at least attempting to run on amd64. Enjoy


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