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Restart Xen XAPI
Restarts the XAPI service on the host, mostly used by Xen Center. It does not affect any running VMs, just the Xen client tools that may be connected. On my list as XAPI frustratingly keeps running out of memory and getting killed off.

Every Nth line position # (AWK)
A better way to show the file lines 3n + 1

Find last 50 modified files

Retrofit a shebang to an existing script
Function to add a shebang to an existing script, handy if you forgot to add it in the first place.

View All Processess Cmdlines and Environments
Grabs the cmdline used to execute the process, and the environment that the process is being run under. This is much different than the 'env' command, which only lists the environment for the shell. This is very useful (to me at least) to debug various processes on my server. For example, this lets me see the environment that my apache, mysqld, bind, and other server processes have. Here's a function I use: $ aa_ps_all () { ( cd /proc && command ps -A -opid= | xargs -I'{}' sh -c 'test $PPID -ne {}&&test -r {}/cmdline&&echo -e "\n[{}]"&&tr -s "\000" " "

Generate diff of first 500 lines of two files
Useful for massive files where doing a full diff would take too long. This just runs diff on the first 500 lines of each. The use of subshells to feed STDIN is quite a useful construct.

Delete Last Line of a File if it is Blank
Use sed to remove the last line of a file only if it is empty.

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
This captures traffic on a remote machine with tshark, sends the raw pcap data over the ssh link, and displays it in wireshark. Hitting ctrl+C will stop the capture and unfortunately close your wireshark window. This can be worked-around by passing -c # to tshark to only capture a certain # of packets, or redirecting the data through a named pipe rather than piping directly from ssh to wireshark. I recommend filtering as much as you can in the tshark command to conserve bandwidth. tshark can be replaced with tcpdump thusly: $ ssh root@example.com tcpdump -w - 'port !22' | wireshark -k -i -

Quick notepad
Quick write some notes to a file with cat. Ctrl+C when you have finish.

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls


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