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Setup an ssh tunnel
Uses ssh as tunnel tunnel for an other connection. -f runs ssh in the background -N tell that there is no command to run -L deals with the forwarding aspect where the first number is the local port number, the second is parameter is the name of the server to forward to and the third parameter is the port number on that server. The last part of the command is the usual ssh form consisting of the user name and remote server name

Keep track of diff progress
You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. $ find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular.

Archive all folders in a directory into their own tar.bz2 file
Remove the "echo" to actually archive. Many similar commands are found on commandlinefu but I end up needing this very specific one from time to time. To extract any of them, use the standard tar.bz2 extract command: $tar xvjf folder1.tar.bz2

Convert PDF to JPG
(relies on 'imagemagick') This command will convert all .pdf files in a directory into a 800px (wide or height, whichever is smaller) image (with the aspect ratio kept) .jpg. If the file is named 'example1.pdf' it will be named 'example1.jpg' when it is complete. This is a VERY worthwhile command! People pay hundreds of dollars for this in the Windows world. My .jpg files average between 150kB to 300kB, but your's may differ.

find duplicate processes
This command will allow to search for duplicate processes and sort them by their run count. Note that if there are same processes run by different users you'll see only one user in the result line, so you'll need to do: $ ps aux | grep to see all users that run this command.

Pick a random line from a file
This is from perldoc -q random.*line, which says: This has a significant advantage in space over reading the whole file in. You can find a proof of this method in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Section 3.4.2, by Donald E. Knuth. Who am I to argue with Don Knuth?

perl one-liner to get the current week number
Not perl but shorter.

Performance tip: compress /usr/
Periodically run the one-liner above if/when there are significant changes to the files in /usr/ = Before rebooting, add following to /etc/fstab : = $ /squashed/usr/usr.sfs /squashed/usr/ro squashfs loop,ro 0 0 $ usr /usr aufs udba=reval,br:/squashed/usr/rw:/squashed/usr/ro 0 0 No need to delete original /usr/ ! (unless you don't care about recovery). Also AuFS does not work with XFS

find established tcp connections without using netstat!!
Fast and easy way to find all established tcp connections without using the netstat command.

Shortcut to find files with ease.
It looks for files that contains the given word as parameter. * case insensitive * matches files containing the given word.


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