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Enter a command but keep it out of the history
Put a space in front of your command on the command line and it will not be logged as part of your command line history.

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

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.

Add prefix onto filenames
Best to try first with -n flag, to preview

set desktop background to highest-rated image from Reddit /r/wallpapers
You'll need "feh" to set the background from the commandline. Install with "apt-get install feh" Thanks to the Redditors on this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bira4/is_there_a_linux_version_of_this_preferably_a/

To print a specific line from a file
Just one character longer than the sed version ('FNR==5' versus -n 5p). On my system, without using "exit" or "q", the awk version is over four times faster on a ~900K file using the following timing comparison: $ testfile="testfile"; for cmd in "awk 'FNR==20'" "sed -n '20p'"; do echo; echo $cmd; eval "$cmd $testfile"; for i in {1..3}; do time for j in {1..100}; do eval "$cmd $testfile" >/dev/null; done; done; done Adding "exit" or "q" made the difference between awk and sed negligible and produced a four-fold improvement over the awk timing without the "exit". For long files, an exit can speed things up: $ awk 'FNR==5{print;exit}'

Get all these commands in a text file with description.
I tried out on my Mac, jot to generate sequence ( 0,25,50,..), you can use 'seq' if it is linux to generate numbers, need curl installed on the machine, then it rocks. @Satya

Compare copies of a file with md5
I had the problem that the Md5 Sum of a file changed after copying it to my external disk. This unhandy command helped me to fix the problem.

List the largest directories & subdirectoties in the current directory sorted from largest to smallest.

Define an alias with a correct completion
In Bash, when defining an alias, one usually loses the completion related to the function used in that alias (that completion is usually defined in /etc/bash_completion using the complete builtin). It's easy to reuse the work done for that completion in order to have smart completion for our alias. That's what is done by this command line (that's only an example but it may be very easy to reuse). Note 1 : You can use given command line in a loop "for old in apt-get apt-cache" if you want to define aliases like that for many commands. Note 2 : You can put the output of the command directly in your .bashrc file (after the ". /etc/bash_completion") to always have the alias and its completion


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