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Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Determine if a port is open with bash
For times when netcat isn't available. Will throw a Connection refused message if a port is closed. Scriptable: $ (: /dev/null && echo "OPEN" || echo "CLOSED"

scp with compression.
-C is for compression.

Matrix Style

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"

tar pipe to copy files, alternate to cp -Ra
uses tar to dump files from /orignl/path to /dst/dir. i find tar's out more readable than cp, and it doesn't mess with modified dates.

Lists all listening ports together with the PID of the associated process
This command is more portable than it's cousin netstat. It works well on all the BSDs, GNU/Linux, AIX and Mac OS X. You won't find lsof by default on Solaris or HPUX by default, but packages exist around the web for installation, if needed, and the command works as shown. This is the most portable command I can find that lists listening ports and their associated pid.

print DateTimeOriginal from EXIF data for all files in folder
see output from `identify -verbose` for other keywords to filter for (e.g. date:create, exif:DateTime, EXIF:ExifOffset).

throttle bandwidth with cstream
this bzips a folder and transfers it over the network to "host" at 777k bit/s. cstream can do a lot more, have a look http://www.cons.org/cracauer/cstream.html#usage for example: $ echo w00t, i'm 733+ | cstream -b1 -t2 hehe :)

List upcoming events on google calendar
Requires googlecl (http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) Even better when you wrap this in a script and allow the --date=STRING to be $1. Then you can type: whatson "next Thursday" The date string for UNIX date is very flexible. You can also add --cal "[regex]" to the end for multiple calendars.


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