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grep compressed log files without extracting
accomplishes the same thing without unzipping the whole file, and while i have never seen a log.tar.gz file that was a binary, i will concede that it might happen, so add the -a in there: $zgrep -ia "string" log.tar.gz it's still shorter/easier to type...

download the contents of a remote folder in the current local folder

get the top 10 longest filenames

command! -nargs=1 Vs vs <args>
Because entering ':' requires that you press shift, sometimes common command-line / mini-buffer commands will be capitalized by accident.

send a circular

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"

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

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

Redirect incoming traffic to SSH, from a port of your choosing
Stuck behind a restrictive firewall at work, but really jonesing to putty home to your linux box for some colossal cave? Goodness knows I was...but the firewall at work blocked all outbound connections except for ports 80 and 443. (Those were wide open for outbound connections.) So now I putty over port 443 and have my linux box redirect it to port 22 (the SSH port) before it routes it internally. So, my specific command would be: $iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 22 Note that I use -A to append this command to the end of the chain. You could replace that with -I to insert it at the beginning (or at a specific rulenum). My linux box is running slackware, with a kernel from circa 2001. Hopefully the mechanics of iptables haven't changed since then. The command is untested under any other distros or less outdated kernels. Of course, the command should be easy enough to adapt to whatever service on your linux box you're trying to reach by changing the numbers (and possibly changing tcp to udp, or whatever). Between putty and psftp, however, I'm good to go for hours of time-killing.

Generate a binary file with all ones (0xff) in it
This is similar to how you would generate a file with all zeros $ dd if=/dev/zero of=allzeros bs=1024 count=2k


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