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change ownership en masse of files owned by a specific user, including files and directories with spaces
In the example, uid 0 is root. foo:foo are the user:group you want to make owner and group. '.' is the "current directory and below." -print0 and -0 indicate that filenames and directories "are terminated by a null character instead of by whitespace."

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS
Shorter version, works with multiple words.

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
Only the number of calls nothing else.

Displays the attempted user name, ip address, and time of SSH failed logins on Debian machines
A variation of a script I found on this site and then slimmed down to just use awk. It displays all users who have attempted to login to the box and failed using SSH. Pipe it to the sort command to see which usernames have the most failed logins.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Pretty-print user/group info for a given user

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

Graphically show percent of mount space used
Automatically drops mount points that have non-numeric sizes (e.g. /proc). Tested in bash on Linux and AIX.

Email an svn dump
Dumps a compressed svn backup to a file, and emails the files along with any messages as the body of the email

Unzip and untar a *.tar.gz file in one go to a specific directory
A *.tar.gz file needs to be unzipped & then untarred. Previously I might have unzipped first with $gunzip -d file.tar.gz and then untarred the result with $tar -xvf file.tar (Options are extract, verbose, file) Using the -z (decompress) option on tar avoids the use of gzip (or gunzip) first. Additionally the -C option will specify the directory to extract to.


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