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Ping all hosts on 192.168.1.0/24

find all active IP addresses in a network
Have to run as superuser... but easier and more informational if you are looking for actual devices. Need to install arp-scan.

Using Git, stage all manually deleted files.

Lists all listening ports together with the PID of the associated process
This command is more portable than it's cousin netstat. It works well on all the BSDs, GNU/Linux, AIX and Mac OS X. You won't find lsof by default on Solaris or HPUX by default, but packages exist around the web for installation, if needed, and the command works as shown. This is the most portable command I can find that lists listening ports and their associated pid.

Periodic Log Deletion
deletes logs not modified in over [#] days - modify to compress or move, as needed

"hidden" remote shell
opens a "hidden" remote shell (login will not appear in "last" for example). This is not really hidden, because the login will be shown in auth.log and the process is visible anyways. ssh -T = Disable pseudo-tty allocation. bash -i = interactive shell

Perl Command Line Interpreter
Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop - REPL

check for write/read permissions
su www-apache/ftp user and then check readable: find ~/ -type d \( -wholename '/dev/*' -o -wholename '/sys/*' -o -wholename '/proc/*' \) -prune -o -exec test -r {} \; -exec echo {} readable \; 2>/dev/null check writable: find ~/ -type d \( -wholename '/dev/*' -o -wholename '/sys/*' -o -wholename '/proc/*' \) -prune -o -exec test -w {} \; -exec echo {} writable \; 2>/dev/null

write the output of a command to /var/log/user.log... each line will contain $USER, making this easy to grep for.
This command is useful if you want to copy the output of a series of commands to a file, for example if you want to pastebin the output from 'uname -a', 'lspci -vvv' and 'lsmod' for video driver trouble-shooting on your favorite Linux forum. 'log' takes all the following arguments as a command to execute, with STDOUT sent to /var/log/user.log. The command is echoed to the log before it is executed. The advantages of using logger (as opposed to appending output from commands to a file) are 1) commands are always appended to the logs... you don't have to worry about clobbering your log file accidentally by using '>' rather than '>>' 2) logs are automatically cleaned up by logrotate. The following functions allow you to mark the start and end of a section of /var/log/user.log. $ startlog() { export LOGMARK=$(date +%Y.%m.%d_%H:%M:%S); echo "$LOGMARK.START" | logger -t $USER; } then $ endlog() { echo "$LOGMARK.END" | logger -t $USER; } printlog will print all lines between $LOGMARK.START and $LOGMARK.END, removing everything that is prepended to each line by logger. $ printlog() { sudo sed -n -e "/$LOGMARK.START/,/$LOGMARK.END/p" /var/log/user.log| sed "s/.*$USER: //"; } The following command should dump just about all the information that you could possibly want about your linux configuration into the clipboard. $ startlog; for cmd in 'uname -a' 'cat /etc/issue' 'dmesg' 'lsusb' 'lspci' 'sudo lshw' 'lsmod'; do log $cmd; done; endlog; printlog | xsel --clipboard This is ready for a trip to http://pastebin.com/, and you don't have to worry about leaving temporary files lying around cluttering up $HOME. Caveats: I'm sure that startlog, endlog, and printlog could use some cleanup and error checking... there are unchecked dependencies between printlog and endlog, as well as between endlog and startlog. It might be useful for 'log' to send stderr to logger as well.

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


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