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escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

Rename HTML files according to their title tag
The above one-liner could be run against all HTML files in a directory. It renames the HTML files based on the text contained in their title tag. This helped me in a situation where I had a directory containing thousands of HTML documents with meaningless filenames.

Run the last command as root
this command also can run the last command as root what's more, sudo !-2 can run the second last command as root , and so on

Stage only portions of the changes to a file.

Show recent earthquakes in Bay Area
To see only earthquakes for today, add another pipe to egrep "`date '+%Y/%m/%d'`"

Determine space taken by files of certain type
Just how much space are those zillions of database logs taking up ? How much will you gain on a compression rate of say 80% ? This little line gives you a good start for your calculations.

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Displays the version of the Adobe Flash plugin installed
This is for Debian, simply change the path if your Flash plugin is installed elsewhere.

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing


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