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"hidden" remote shell
opens a "hidden" remote shell (login will not appear in "last" for example). This is not really hidden, because the login will be shown in auth.log and the process is visible anyways. ssh -T = Disable pseudo-tty allocation. bash -i = interactive shell

kill all foo process
Kill all processes with foo in them. Similar to pkill but more complete and also works when there is no pkill command. Works on almost every Linux/Unix platform I have tried.

How to know the total number of packages available

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Rename files in batch

Create a zip archive excluding all SVN folders

Get ethX mac addresses
I much prefer using /sbin/ip over /sbin/ifconfig for most everything. I find the interface and output to be much more consistent and it has many abilities that ifconfig, route, etc. do not. To get the mac address for only one interface, add 'show dev [interface]' to the 'ip link' part of the command: ip link show dev eth0 | grep 'link/ether' | awk '{print $2}' . Also, both this command and the ifconfig one do not require root access to run, so the sudo is not necessary.

Compress excutable files in place.
The gzexe utility allows you to compress executables in place and have them automatically uncompress and execute when you run them. FYI: You can compress any executable sha-bang scripts as well (py, pl, sh, tcl, etc.).

Recover tmp flash videos (deleted immediately by the browser plugin)
Newer versions of the flashplayer browser plugin delete the tmp flash video immediately after opening a filehandle to prevent the user from "exporting" the video by simply copying the /tmp/FlashXYZ file. This command searches such deleted flash videos and creates symbolic links to the opened filehandle with the same name as the deleted file. This allows you to play your flash-videos (from e.g. youtube) with e.g. mplayer or copy the buffered video if you want to keep it.

Ensure that each machine that you log in to has its own history file
On systems where your home directory is shared across different machines, your bash history will be global, rather than being a separate history per machine. This setting in your .bashrc file will ensure that each machine has its own history file.


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