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use screen as a terminal emulator to connect to serial consoles
Use GNU/screen as a terminal emulator for anything serial console related. screen /dev/tty eg. screen /dev/ttyS0 9600 MacOSX: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061109133825654 Cheat Sheet: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/screen-terminal-emulator-cheat-sheet/

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Null a file with sudo

Verify if ntpd is working properly
Used to verify if Network Time Protocol daemon is working properly.

Pick a random line from a file

kill a process(e.g. conky) by its name, useful when debugging conky:)

Server load and process monitoring
In certain cases you mighy need to monitor the server load caused by certain process. For example HTTP, while stress testing apache using ab (apache benchmark) you may want to monitor the server status,load, # of spawned HTTP processes, # of established connections, # of connections in close wait state, apache memory footprint etc.

Schedule a script or command in x num hours, silently run in the background even if logged out
This is helpful for shell scripts, I use it in my custom php install script to schedule to delete the build files in 3 hours, as the php install script is completely automated and is made to run slow. Does require at, which some environments without crontab still do have. You can add as many commands to the at you want. Here's how I delete them in case the script gets killed. (trapped) atq |awk '{print $1}'|xargs -iJ atrm J &>/dev/null

Printing multiple years with Unix cal command
src: http://tinyapps.org/weblog/nix/200907090700_linux_cal_print_multiple_years.html

Clear all Windows Event Log entries (cygwin)
Efficiently clear all Windows Event log entries from within a Cygwin terminal. Uses "cygstart" to launch a hidden "PowerShell" session passing a Powershell command to loop through and clear all Windows Event Log entries. Very useful for troubleshooting and debugging. The command should in theory elevate you session if needed. One liner is based on the PowerShell command: $ wevtutil el | foreach { wevtutil cl $_ }


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