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Test disk I/O
Especially useful to gauge the performance of a VPS.

create shortcut keys in bash

easily strace all your apache processes
This version also attaches to new processes forked by the parent apache process. That way you can trace all current and *future* apache processes.

connect via ssh using mac address
Instead of looking for the right ip address, just pick whatever address you like and set a static ip mapping.

Shutdown a Windows machine from Linux
This will issue a shutdown command to the Windows machine. username must be an administrator on the Windows machine. Requires samba-common package installed. Other relevant commands are: net rpc shutdown -r : reboot the Windows machine net rpc abortshutdown : abort shutdown of the Windows machine Type: net rpc to show all relevant commands

Sorted, recursive long file listing
Tells you everything you could ever want to know about all files and subdirectories. Great for package creators. Totally secure too. On my Slackware box, this gets set upon login: $ LS_OPTIONS='-F -b -T 0 --color=auto' and $ alias ls='/bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS' which works great.

List of reverse DNS records for a subnet
This command uses nmap to perform reverse DNS lookups on a subnet. It produces a list of IP addresses with the corresponding PTR record for a given subnet. You can enter the subnet in CDIR notation (i.e. /24 for a Class C)). You could add "--dns-servers x.x.x.x" after the "-sL" if you need the lookups to be performed on a specific DNS server. On some installations nmap needs sudo I believe. Also I hope awk is standard on most distros.

Terminal - Show directories in the PATH, one per line with sed and bash3.X `here string'
another method : awk '{gsub(/:/, "\n");print}'

copies 20 most recently downloaded mp3 files (such as from Miro) into a directory
Change ~/tmp to the destination directory, such as your mounted media. Change -n20 to whatever number of files to copy. It should quit when media is full. I use this to put my most recently downloaded podcasts onto my phone.

track flights from the command line
Usage: flight_status airline_code flight_number (optional)_offset_of_departure_date_from_today So for instance, to track a flight which departed yesterday, the optional 3rd parameter should have a value of -1. eg. flight_status ua 3655 -1 output --------- Status: Arrived Departure: San Francisco, CA (SFO) Scheduled: 6:30 AM, Jan 3 Takeoff: 7:18 AM, Jan 3 Term-Gate: Term 1 - 32A Arrival: Newark, NJ (EWR) Scheduled: 2:55 PM, Jan 3 At Gate: 3:42 PM, Jan 3 Term-Gate: Term C - C131 Note: html2text needs to be installed for this command. only tested on ubuntu 9.10


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