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repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"

follow the content of all files in a directory
The `-q' arg forces tail to not output the name of the current file

get the oldest file in a directory
reverse the sorting of ls to get the newest file: $ls -1tr --group-directories-first /path/to/dir/ | tail -n 1 Problems: If there are no files in the directory you will get a directory or nothing.

Get MD5 checksum from a pipe stream and do not alter it

Google Spell Checker
http://immike.net/blog/2007/04/07/hacking-google-spell-checker-for-fun-and-profit/

Write a listing of all directories and files on the computer to a compressed file.
This command is meant to be used to make a lightweight backup, for when you want to know which files might be missing or changed, but you don't care about their contents (because you have some way to recover them). Explanation of parts: "ls -RFal /" lists all files in and below the root directory, along with their permissions and some other metadata. I think sudo is necessary to allow ls to read the metadata of certain files. "| gzip" compresses the result, from 177 MB to 16 MB in my case. "> all_files_list.txt.gz" saves the result to a file in the current directory called all_files_list.txt.gz. This name can be changed, of course.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Extract a bash function
I often need to extract a function from a bash script and this command will do it.

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Update IP filter for qBittorrent
Downloads Bluetack's level 1 IP blocklist in .p2p format, suitable for various Bittorrent clients.


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