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copy partition table from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb

Force machine to reboot no matter what (even if /sbin/shutdown is hanging)
This will cause your machine to INSTANTLY reboot. No un-mounting of drives or anything. Very handy when something has gone horribly wrong with your server in that co-location facility miles away with no remote hands! Suspect this works with all 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels compiled with magic-syskey-request support.

Rename files in batch

Extract the MBR ID of a device
Useful when you want to know the mbrid of a device - for the purpose of making it bootable. Certain hybridiso distros, for eg the OpenSUSE live ISO uses the mbrid to find the live media. Use this command to find out the mbrid of your USB drive and then edit the /grub/mbrid file to match it.

Restrict the bandwidth for the SCP command
the command is obvious, I know, but maybe not everyone knows that using the parameter "-l" you can limit the use of bandwidth command scp. In this example fetch all files from the directory zutaniddu and I copy them locally using only 10 Kbs

ssh tunnel with auto reconnect ability

Setup a persistant SSH tunnel w/ pre-shared key authentication
This creates a persistent ssh -i /path/to/key -ND local-IP:PORT User@Server connection. You may have to install autossh. -f puts in daemon mode. if you are having trouble, try it without -f.

Duplicating service runlevel configurations from one server to another.
And then to complete the task: Go to target host; $ssh host Turn everything off: $for i in `chkconfig --list | fgrep :on | awk '{print $1}'` ; do chkconfig --level 12345 $i off; done Create duplicate config: $while read line; do chkconfig --level $line on; done < foo

Show directories in the PATH, one per line
This version uses Pipes, but is easier for the common user to grasp... instead of using sed or some other more complicated method, it uses the tr command

floating point operations in shell scripts
-l auto-selects many more digits (but you can round/truncate in your head, right) plus it loads a few math functions like sin().


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