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Save your open windows to a file so they can be opened after you restart
This will save your open windows to a file (~/.windows). To start those applications: $ cat ~/.windows | while read line; do $line &; done Should work on any EWMH/NetWM compatible X Window Manager. If you use DWM or another Window Manager not using EWMH or NetWM try this: $ xwininfo -root -children | grep '^ ' | grep -v children | grep -v '' | sed -n 's/^ *\(0x[0-9a-f]*\) .*/\1/p' | uniq | while read line; do xprop -id $line _NET_WM_PID | sed -n 's/.* = \([0-9]*\)$/\1/p'; done | uniq -u | grep -v '^$' | while read line; do ps -o cmd= $line; done > ~/.windows

Find the package that installed a command

Port scan a range of hosts with Netcat.
Simple one-liner for scanning a range of hosts, you can also scan a range of ports with Netcat by ex.: nc -v -n -z -w 1 192.168.0.1 21-443 Useful when Nmap is not available:) Range declaration like X..X "for i in {21..29}" is only works with bash 3.0+

launch bash without using any letters
I don't know why anyone would use this, I was just messing around tonight and managed to start bash without using any letters and thought I would share. It's pretty simple, first it tries to execute "-" redirecting stderr to stdout which prints the error "bash: -: command not found" to standard output, then I try to execute "bash: -: command not found" which produces the output "bash: bash: -: command not found: command not found". lastly, (on the other side of the semicolon) I use the underscore environment variable which refers to the last command run ("bash: -: command not found") and take out everything after the first ":" character using brace expressions and your left with "bash"

delete files containing matching text
-r recursively -Z zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline -l only filenames

nagios wrapper for any script/cron etc
use w/ check_freshness. passes the last line of output and exit code to nagios via nsca

Run TOP in Color, split 4 ways for x seconds - the ultimate ps command. Great for init scripts
One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000! $ G=$(stty -g);stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2));top -n1; stty $G;unset G Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well. # save the correct settings to G var. $ G=$(stty -g) # change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise $ stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2)) # run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least) $ top -n1 # reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself $ stty $G;unset G This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this! Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ] Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed

Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.
If BREs can be used, this sed version will also get the job done.

Backup trought SSH

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.


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