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Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Start a new command in a new screen window
If you are already running screen then you often want to start a command in a fresh window. You use this alias by typing 's whatever' from your command line and 'whatever' starts running in a new window. Good with interactive commands like info, vim, and nethack.

Kill all processes that listen to ports begin with 50 (50, 50x, 50xxx,...)
Run netstat as root (via sudo) to get the ID of the process listening on the desired socket. Use awk to 1) match the entry that is the listening socket, 2) matching the exact port (bounded by leading colon and end of column), 3) remove the trailing slash and process name from the last column, and finally 4) use the system(…) command to call kill to terminate the process. Two direct commands, netstat & awk, and one forked call to kill. This does kill the specific port instead of any port that starts with 50. I consider this to be safer.

Delete empty directories
Recursively delete empty directories. Use with care.

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"

Insert an element into xml
This inserts an element as last child under /breakfast_menu/food in simple.xml. xml used - http://www.w3schools.com/xml/simple.xml

git pull all repos

return a titlecased version of the string
Needs Bash4. Found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264428/converting-string-to-lower-case-in-bash-shell-scripting alongside a few other tricks.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

find all active IP addresses in a network


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