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Compress a file or directory keeping the owner and permissions

Repoint an existing symlink to a new location
Instead of deleting an existing symlink and then re-creating it pointing at the new location, it is possible to perform the same action with this one command. Interesting discussion on whether this is possible to do atomically here: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=526119

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"

Compare two CSV files, discarding any repeated lines
The value for the sort command's -k argument is the column in the CSV file to sort on. In this example, it sorts on the second column. You must use some form of the sort command in order for uniq to work properly.

Find common groups between two users

Pull up remote desktop for other than gnome/kde eg fluxbox
If the remote doesn't export its desktop (eg fluxbox, blackbox etc) then you need to run a x11vnc server there and a vncviewer at the local end. This command does the lot for you - it assumes that you can 'ssh' to the box without a password and that x11vnc is installed at the remote end.

List processes playing sound
When trying to play a sound you may sometimes get an error saying that your sound card is already used, but not by what process. This will list all processes playing sound, useful to kill processes that you no longer need but that keep using your sound card.

Open Finder from the current Terminal location
I did not know this, i'd like to share...

Create a self-signed certificate for Apache Tomcat
Must be run as root. The 'tomcat' user must have access to the .keystore file. The key and keystore passwords must be the same. The password must be entered into the server.xml config file for Tomcat.

Skip to next selection in playlist
Uses process signal to play next selection


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