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View non-printing characters with cat
Useful to detect number of tabs in an empty line, DOS newline (carriage return + newline). A tool that can help you understand why your parsing is not working.

Change Windows Domain password from Linux
If you use Linux in a Windows domain and there are N days to expiry, this is how you can change it without resorting to a windows machine.

unbuffered python output
You have a python script that slowly prints output, you want to pipe the output to grep or tee, and you are impatient and want to watch the results right away. Rather than modify your script (making it slightly less efficient), use the -u option to have the output unbuffered.

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

Show your current network interface in use

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"

script broadcast-pppoe-discover

Check to make sure the whois nameservers match the nameserver records from the nameservers themselves
Change the $domain variable to whichever domain you wish to query. Works with the majority of whois info; for some that won't, you may have to compromise: domain=google.com; for a in $(whois $domain | grep "Domain servers in listed order:" --after 3 | grep -v "Domain servers in listed order:"); do echo ">>> Nameservers for $domain from $a

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

Sort output by column
(separator = $IFS)


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