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Select rectangular screen area
Hold 'Ctrl' + 'Alt' key while selecting rectangular text area of the screen with left mouse button. Should work in any terminal screen (xterm, konsole, ...) under X, if not then try with 'Ctrl' + 'Shift' + 'Alt' or two-combination of these.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

dd with progress bar
piping through 'pv' shows a simple progress/speed bar for dd. This is a replacement for my otherwise favorite 'while :;do killall -USR1 dd;sleep 1;done'

Search apache virtual host by pattern
Outputs contents of virtual hosts containing PATTERN. Particularly useful for pefrorming complex searches. E.g. search for docroot of www.example.com: $ sed -n '/^[^#]*

List only the directories
This command would be useful when it is desirable to list only the directories. 'egrep' chooses only the lines that begin with 'd'.

Function to change prompt
Bash function to change your default prompt to something simpler and restore it to normal afterwards.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

display ip address
add this alias in .bashrc to fast check the ip address of your modem router alias myip="curl -s http://myip.dk | grep '' | sed -e 's/]*>//g'"

Change the homepage of Firefox
This command modifies the preferences file of Firefox that is located in .mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js. It edits the file with sed and the -i option. Then it searches the string "browser.startup.homepage", and the string next to it (second string). Finally, it replaces the second string with the new homepage, that is http://sliceoflinux.com in the example. It doesn't work if you haven't set any homepage.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }


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