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Use /dev/full to test language I/O-failsafety
The Linux /dev/full file simulates a "disk full" condition, and can be used to verify how a program handles this situation. In particular, several programming language implementations do not print error diagnostics (nor exit with error status) when I/O errors like this occur, unless the programmer has taken additional steps. That is, simple code in these languages does not fail safely. In addition to Perl, C, C++, Tcl, and Lua (for some functions) also appear not to fail safely.

Listing only one repository with yum
How to list just one repo with yum. First I disable all repo, second I enable just the repo that I want to list.

Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)
This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

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"

run complex remote shell cmds over ssh, without escaping quotes
It executes commands as arguments to ssh, avoiding problematic shell expansions, without the need of writing the commands in question to a temporary file, just reading them from STDIN.

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

diff directories, quick cut and paste to view the changes
We use this to quickly highlight differences and provide a quick way to cut and paste the command to view the files using the marvellous vimdiff

Backup a file with a date-time stamp
$ buf myfile.txt This is useful when you are making small but frequent changes to a file. It keeps things organised and clear for another administrator to see what changed and at what time. An overview of changes can be deduced using a simple: $ ls -ltr

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

fdiff is a 'filtered diff'. Given a text filter and two inputs, will run the filter across the input files and diff the output.
Fdiff will run the command given by the first argument against the input files given as the second and third arguments, and diff the results. It will use 'diff' as the default diff program, but this can be changed by setting $DIFFCMD, e.g. $ export DIFFCMD=vimdiff; $ fdiff zcat 0716_0020005.raw.gz 0716_0030005.raw.gz ... This function will work under bash, but requires the use of command substitution, which is not available under a strict ANSI shell.


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