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Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Quickly (soft-)reboot skipping hardware checks
If you are doing some tests which require reboots (e. g. startup skripts, kernel module parameters, ...), this is very time intensive, if you have got a hardware with a long pre-boot phase due to hardware checks. At this time, kexec can help, which only restarts the kernel with all related stuff. First the kernel to be started is loaded, then kexec -e jumps up to start it. Is as hard as a reboot -f, but several times faster (e. g. 1 Minute instead of 12 on some servers here).

rsync...

Measures download speed on eth0

grep apache access.log and list IP's by hits and date - sorted

Kill all Zombie processes (Guaranteed!)
It identifies the parents of the Zombie processes and kill them. So the new parent of orphan Zombies will be the Init process and he is already waiting for reaping them. Be careful! It may also kill your useful processes just because they are not taking care and waiting for their children (bad parents!).

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)

ls -hog --> a more compact ls -l
I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog'

Show a git log with offsets relative to HEAD
Print a git log (in reverse order) giving a reference relative to HEAD. HEAD (the current revision) can also be referred to as HEAD~0 The previous revision is HEAD~1 then HEAD~2 etc. . Add line numbers to the git output, starting at zero: $ ... | nl -v0 | ... . Insert the string 'HEAD~' before the number using sed: $ ... | sed 's/^ \+/&HEAD~/' . Thanks to bartonski for the idea :-)

Check disk for bad sectors
Checks HDD for bad sectors, just like scandisk or chkdisk under some other operating system ;-).


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