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how to find the active X (X11/xorg) username and DISPLAY variable
Requires consolekit (works in e.g. Ubuntu). Here x11-display is DISPLAY

easy C shell math calculators
allows simple C shell access to the power of bc - never could figure out how to do the same thing with Bash - that's why I use tcsh most of the time.

Sort a character string
Sorts a character string, using common shell commands.

Count occurrences per minute in a log file
The cut should match the relevant timestamp part of the logfile, the uniq will count the number of occurrences during this time interval.

Git Global search and replace
Find all the occurrences in the git repo of 'foo' and replace with 'bar'

find text in a file
this will find text in the directory you specify and give you line where it appears.

Graphical tree of sub-directories with files
The command finds every item within the directory and edits the output so that subdirectories are and files are output much like the tree command

reverse-i-search: Search through your command line history
"What it actually shows is going to be dependent on the commands you've previously entered. When you do this, bash looks for the last command that you entered that contains the substring "ls", in my case that was "lsof ...". If the command that bash finds is what you're looking for, just hit Enter to execute it. You can also edit the command to suit your current needs before executing it (use the left and right arrow keys to move through it). If you're looking for a different command, hit Ctrl+R again to find a matching command further back in the command history. You can also continue to type a longer substring to refine the search, since searching is incremental. Note that the substring you enter is searched for throughout the command, not just at the beginning of the command." - http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-bash-history-more-efficiently

Watch for when your web server returns
If your web server is down, this command will periodically attempt to connect to it. If the output is blank, your server is not yet up. If you see HTML, your server is up. Obviously, you need to replace the Google URL with your web server URL... * 'watch' -- a command for re-executing a command and displaying the output * '-n 15' -- tells watch to redo the command every 15 seconds * 'curl' -- a handy utility for getting the source of a web page * '-s' -- tells curl to be silent about failing * '--connect-timeout 10' -- Try to connect for 10 seconds

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)


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