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Realtime lines per second in a log file
Displays the realtime line output rate of a logfile. -l tels pv to count lines -i to refresh every 10 seconds -l option is not in old versions of pv. If the remote system has an old pv version: ssh tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | pv -l -i10 -r >/dev/null

Poor man's nmap for a class C network from rfc1918
What do you do when nmap is not available and you want to see the hosts responding to an icmp echo request ? This one-liner will print all hosts responding with their ipv4 address.

from the console, start a second X server
This starts a very basic X session, with just a simple xterm. You can use this xterm to launch your preferred distant session. $ ssh -X john@otherbox gnome-session Try also startkde or fluxbox or xfce4-session. To switch between your two X servers, use CTRL+ALT+F7 and CTRL+ALT+F8.

Updated top ten memory utilizing processes (child/instance aggregation) now with percentages of total RAM
Prints the top 10 memory consuming processes (with children and instances aggregated) sorted by total RSS and calculates the percentage of total RAM each uses. Please note that since RSS can include shared libraries it is possible for the percentages to add up to more that the total amount of RAM, but this still gives you a pretty good idea. Also note that this does not work with the mawk version of awk, but it works fine with GNU Awk which is on most Linux systems. It also does not work on OS X.

Extract busiest times from apache access log
Analyze an Apache access log for the time period with most activity and display the hit count, requesting IP and the timestamp. May help detect a brute force dos attack.

Localize provenance of current established connections
Sample command to obtain a list of geographic localization for established connections, extracted from netstat. Need geoiplookup command ( part of geoip package under CentOS)

Simple addicting bash game.
hold period (or whatever character) and hit enter after a second. You need to make the next line of periods the same length as the previous line... score starts at 0 and increase each time length of line is same.

Get the ip registered to a domain on OpenWRT
I use this in a script on my openwrt router to check if my DynDNS needs to be updated, saves your account from being banned for blank updates.

Create a bunch of dummy text files
Using the 'time' command, running this with 'tr' took 28 seconds (and change) each time but using base64 only took 8 seconds (and change). If the file doesn't have to be viewable, pulling straight from urandom with head only took 6 seconds (and change)

Do not clear the screen after viewing a file with less
From the manpage: $ man less -X or --no-init Disables sending the termcap initialization and deinitialization strings to the terminal. This is sometimes desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen. Bonus: If you want to clear the screen after viewing a file this way that had sensitive information, hit or just type clear. Since is readily available, I don't know why less bothers to automatically clear. If you're viewing the file at all, chances are you want to see the output from it after you quit.


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