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Create a persistent connection to a machine
Create a persistent SSH connection to the host in the background. Combine this with settings in your ~/.ssh/config: Host host ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster no All the SSH connections to the machine will then go through the persisten SSH socket. This is very useful if you are using SSH to synchronize files (using rsync/sftp/cvs/svn) on a regular basis because it won't create a new socket each time to open an ssh connection.

resolve short urls
since the most url shorteners respond with a header containing the Location: ... this works with most common shorteners

Recover remote tar backup with ssh
Here how to recover the remote backup over ssh

Show a notify popup in Gnome that expires in specified time and does not leave an icon in notifications tray
Tested in Gnome 3.4

create directory and set owner/group/mode in one shot

Display Spinner while waiting for some process to finish
alternatively, run the spinner for 5 seconds: timeout 5 bash -c 'spinner=( Ooooo oOooo ooOoo oooOo ooooO oooOo ooOoo oOooo); while true; do for i in ${spinner[@]}; do for j in seq 0 ${#i}; do echo -en "\b\b"; done; echo -ne "${i}"; sleep 0.2; done; done'

find files in a date range
Find files in a specific date range - in this case, the first half of last year. -newermt = modification time of the file is more recent than this date GNU find allows any date specfication that GNU date would accept, e.g. $ find . -type f -newermt "3 years ago" ! -newermt "2 years ago" or $ find . -type f -newermt "last monday"

Execute a command without saving it in the history
Yes, by correctly setting the HIST* variables you can make certain commands not saved in history. But that's complicated and easy to make a mistake. If you set HISTFILE= to blank, nothing in your current shell session will be saved in history. Although this is not a precise answer to the subject, but it's very simple.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Remove spaces from filenames - through a whole directory tree.
An example of zsh glob qualifiers.


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