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Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
For some reason the 2&>1 does not work for me, but the shorter stdout/stderr redirection >& works perfectly (Ubuntu 10.04).

Get your external IP address with a random commandlinefu.com command
There's been so many ways submitted to get your external IP address that I decided we all need a command that will just go pick a random one from the list and run it. This gets a list of "Get your external IP" commands from commanlinefu.com and selects a random one to run. It will run the command and print out which command it used. This is not a serious entry, but it was a learning exercise for me writing it. My personal favourite is "curl icanhazip.com". I really don't think we need any other ways to do this, but if more come you can make use of them with this command ;o). Here's a more useful command that always gets the top voted "External IP" command, but it's not so much fun: $ eval $(curl -s http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/external/ZXh0ZXJuYWw=/sort-by-votes/plaintext|sed -n '/^# Get your external IP address$/{n;p;q}')

Create a tar file with the current date in the name.

a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
The function 'box' takes either one or two arguments. The first argument is a line of text to be boxed, the second argument (optional) is a character to use to draw the box. By default, the drawing character will be '='. The function 'n()' is a helper function used to draw the upper and lower lines of the box, its arguments are a length, and an character to print. (I used 'n' because 'line', 'ln' and 'l' are all commonly used)

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

count match string lines from file(s)

Perl One Liner to Generate a Random IP Address
A bash version.

list services running (as root)
A quick way to list services running

A sorted summary of disk usage including hidden files and folders
Same result as with 'du -ks .[^.]* * | sort -n' but with size outputs in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

Generat a Random MAC address


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