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Clear filesystem memory cache
Found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=589975

Create tar over SSH
Really useful when out of space in your current machine. You can ran this also with cat for example: $ tar zcvf - /folder/ | ssh root@192.168.0.1 "cat > /dest/folder/file.tar.gz" Or even run other command's: $ tcpdump | ssh root@10.0.0.1 "cat > /tmp/tcpdump.log"

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Simple addicting bash game.
Really bored during class so I made this... Basically, you hold period (or whatever) and hit enter after a second and you need to make the next line of periods the same length as the previous line... My record was 5 lines of the same length. It's best if you do it one handed with your pointer on period and ring on enter.

Quick glance at who's been using your system recently
This command takes the output of the 'last' command, removes empty lines, gets just the first field ($USERNAME), sort the $USERNAMES in reverse order and then gives a summary count of unique matches.

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"

recursive reset file/dir perms
Good for fixing web permissions. You might also want to do something like this and skip files or directories that begin with a period: $ find public_html/stuff -not -name ".*" \( -type d -exec chmod 755 {} + -o -type f -exec chmod 644 {} + \) ...or include a special case for scripts: $ find public_html/stuff -type d -exec chmod 755 {} + -or -type f -name "*.pl" -exec chmod 755 {} + -or -exec chmod 644 {} +

copy timestamps of files from one location to another - useful when file contents are already synced but timestamps are wrong.
Sometimes when copying files from one place to another, the timestamps get lost. Maybe you forgot to add a flag to preserve timestamps in your copy command. You're sure the files are exactly the same in both locations, but the timestamps of the files in the new home are wrong and you need them to match the source. Using this command, you will get a shell script (/tmp/retime.sh) than you can move to the new location and just execute - it will change the timestamps on all the files and directories to their previous values. Make sure you're in the right directory when you launch it, otherwise all the touch commands will create new zero-length files with those names. Since find's output includes "." it will also change the timestamp of the current directory. Ideally rsync would be the way to handle this - since it only sends changes by default, there would be relatively little network traffic resulting. But rsync has to read the entire file contents on both sides to be sure no bytes have changed, potentially causing a huge amount of local disk I/O on each side. This could be a problem if your files are large. My approach avoids all the comparison I/O. I've seen comments that rsync with the "--size-only" and "--times" options should do this also, but it didn't seem to do what I wanted in my test. With my approach you can review/edit the output commands before running them, so you can tell exactly what will happen. The "tee" command both displays the output on the screen for your review, AND saves it to the file /tmp/retime.sh. Credit: got this idea from Stone's answer at http://serverfault.com/questions/344731/rsync-copying-over-timestamps-only?rq=1, and combined it into one line.

Rotate a single page PDF by 180 degrees
More pdftk examples: http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/

Get own public IP address
Returns your external IP address to the command line using only wget


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