One of the best alias ideas I've ever seen! This strips all the comments and such out of a config file so you can see, generally, what it looks like to the program reading it.
# alias
alias cleanconfig='sed -e '\''s/#.*//'\'' -e '\''s/[ ^I]*$//'\'' -e '\''/^$/ d'\'''
# cleanconfig /etc/ntp.conf
driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift
restrict default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery