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Backup your LDAP
Simple way to backup your LDAP entries: put this line on your crontab. The -n switch identifies the dbnum you want to backup (alternatively you can use -b suffix. Check man slapcat for your personal switches)

capture selected window
I think, this is a shorter one :)

Function to output an ASCII character given its decimal equivalent
I've corrected the function. My octal conversion formula was completely wrong. Thanks to pgas at http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/071 for setting me straight. The new function is from pgas and is very fast.

use the real 'rm', distribution brain-damage notwithstanding
The backslash avoids any 'rm' alias that might be present and runs the 'rm' command in $PATH instead. In a misguided attempt to be more "friendly", some Linux distributions (or sites/etc.) alias 'rm' to 'rm -i'. Unfortunately, this trains users to expect that files won't actually be deleted until they okay it. This expectation will fail with catastrophic results when they use other distributions, move to other sites, etc., and doesn't really even work 100% even with the alias. It's too late to fix 'rm', but '\rm' should work everywhere (under bash).

Compare two files side-by-side
I found out about this from Unix Power Tools, and thought it was pretty useful. Use the -w option to change the width of the output, and the -s option to suppress lines that are the same in both files.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

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"

Figure out what shell you're running
short, sweet, and works after sudoing a new shell.

watch iptables counters
This will allow you to watch as matches occur in real-time. To filter out only ACCEPT, DROP, LOG..etc, then run the following command: watch 'iptables -nvL | grep -v "0 0" && grep "ACCEPT"' The -v is used to do an inverted filter. ie. NOT "0 0"

How to copy CD/DVD into hard disk (.iso)
A dear friend of mine asked me how do I copy a DVD to your hard drive? If you want to make a copy of the ISO image that was burned to a CD or DVD, insert that medium into your CD/DVD drive and (assuming /dev/cdrom is associated with your computer?s CD drive) type the following command


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