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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"

Determine the version of a specific package with RPM
In this case, I'm getting the package version for 'redhat-release', but of course, this can be applied to any package installed on the filesystem. This is very handy in scripts that need to determine just the version of the package, without the package name and all the sed and grep hackery to get to the data you want. To find out all the support format strings that 'rpm --qf' supports: $ rpm --querytags

Grab mp3 files from your favorite netcasts, mp3blog, or sites that often have good mp3s
This was gotten from http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000573.html. The line will grab all the mp3 files on the urls listed in text file sourceurls.txt (one url per line) . A much more complete breakdown of the line can be found at the web site mentioned above.

Dump and bz2compress a mysql db
To also move the db backup to another location you could pass the output to the dd command instead of a file $mysqldump -u user -h host -ppwd -B dbname | bzip2 -zc9 | dd ssh usr@server "dd of=db_dump"

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Detect encoding of a text file
This command gives you the charset of a text file, which would be handy if you have no idea of the encoding.

Given a file path, unplug the USB device on which the file is located (the file must be on an USB device !)
You have an external USB drive or key. Apply this command (using the file path of anything on your device) and it will simulate the unplug of this device. If you just want the port, just type : echo $(sudo lshw -businfo | grep -B 1 -m 1 $(df "/path/to/file" | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}' | cut -c 6-8) | head -n 1 | awk '{print $1}' | cut -c 5- | tr ":" "-")

find and grep Word docs
Find Word docs by filename in the current directory, convert each of them to plain text using antiword (taking care of spaces in filenames), then grep for a search term in the particular file. (Of course, it's better to save your data as plain text to make for easier grepping, but that's not always possible.) Requires antiword. Or you can modify it to use catdoc instead.

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Tell Analytics to fuck itself.
See http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html if you are unclear about the Google Analytics cookie system. If Firefox is your daily browser, be a good Orwellian and run this command regularly. If you see, 'SQL error near line 1: database is locked', close Firefox and run again.


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