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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"

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

Generate a random password 30 characters long
The pwgen program generates passwords which are designed to be easily memorized by humans, while being as secure as possible. Human-memorable passwords are never going to be as secure as completely completely random passwords. [from pwgen man page]

create directory and set owner/group/mode in one shot

See non printable caracters like tabulations, CRLF, LF line terminators ( colored )
For fancier and cleaner output, try the following snippet : $ showendlines(){ while read i; do od --address-radix=n --width=$(wc -c

setup a tunnel from destination machine port 80 to localhost 2001, via a second (hub) machine.
this is handy when the hubmachine is the only machine that can connect to the destination machine (allowed on ip by firewall) and you want to access it from your laptop.

reset Mageia urpmi media sources to network only
On Mageia (and Mandriva) Linux, this command will clear your existing urpmi configuration and configure it to use only network sources. It can be useful after you have installed from CD/DVD and don't want to continually be prompted to insert CD/DVD each time you install a package. acknowledgement: blino

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

securely erase unused blocks in a partition
This command securely erases all the unused blocks on a partition. The unused blocks are the "free space" on the partition. Some of these blocks will contain data from previously deleted files. You might want to use this if you are given access to an old computer and you do not know its provenance. The command could be used while booted from a LiveCD to clear freespace space on old HD. On modern Linux LiveCDs, the "ntfs-3g" system provides ReadWrite access to NTFS partitions thus enabling this method to also be used on Wind'ohs drives. NB depending on the size of the partition, this command could take a while to complete.

restore the contents of a deleted file for which a descriptor is still available
Note that the file at the given path will have the contents of the (still) deleted file, but it is a new file with a new node number; in other words, this restores the data, but it does not actually "undelete" the old file. I posted a function declaration encapsulating this functionality to http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7yx6f/how_to_undelete_any_open_deleted_file_in_linux/c07sqwe (please excuse the crap formatting).


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