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Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Get full from half remembered commands
Show all commands having the part known by you. Eg: $apropos pdf | less

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'

Copy a file to a new directory created on the fly
You need to cp, mv, scp, ..., some files around from one place to another, and after having laboriously typed out the source path, you remember that the destination directory doesn't yet exist, and so the command will fail. So rather than killing the command line and starting over, just interpolate the results of creating the directory and echo its name. You could DRY this with a for; do; done, but that may be more trouble than it's worth.

Using column to format a directory listing
Using column to format a directory listing

list files recursively by size

write the output of a command to /var/log/user.log... each line will contain $USER, making this easy to grep for.
This command is useful if you want to copy the output of a series of commands to a file, for example if you want to pastebin the output from 'uname -a', 'lspci -vvv' and 'lsmod' for video driver trouble-shooting on your favorite Linux forum. 'log' takes all the following arguments as a command to execute, with STDOUT sent to /var/log/user.log. The command is echoed to the log before it is executed. The advantages of using logger (as opposed to appending output from commands to a file) are 1) commands are always appended to the logs... you don't have to worry about clobbering your log file accidentally by using '>' rather than '>>' 2) logs are automatically cleaned up by logrotate. The following functions allow you to mark the start and end of a section of /var/log/user.log. $ startlog() { export LOGMARK=$(date +%Y.%m.%d_%H:%M:%S); echo "$LOGMARK.START" | logger -t $USER; } then $ endlog() { echo "$LOGMARK.END" | logger -t $USER; } printlog will print all lines between $LOGMARK.START and $LOGMARK.END, removing everything that is prepended to each line by logger. $ printlog() { sudo sed -n -e "/$LOGMARK.START/,/$LOGMARK.END/p" /var/log/user.log| sed "s/.*$USER: //"; } The following command should dump just about all the information that you could possibly want about your linux configuration into the clipboard. $ startlog; for cmd in 'uname -a' 'cat /etc/issue' 'dmesg' 'lsusb' 'lspci' 'sudo lshw' 'lsmod'; do log $cmd; done; endlog; printlog | xsel --clipboard This is ready for a trip to http://pastebin.com/, and you don't have to worry about leaving temporary files lying around cluttering up $HOME. Caveats: I'm sure that startlog, endlog, and printlog could use some cleanup and error checking... there are unchecked dependencies between printlog and endlog, as well as between endlog and startlog. It might be useful for 'log' to send stderr to logger as well.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

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

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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