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Check if filesystem hangs
When a fs hangs and you've just one console, even # ls could be a dangerous command. Simply put a trailing "&" and play safe

Display unique values of a column
Find the unique values of a column utilizing awk. Credits goes to here (posted by "era"): http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/77138-awk-print-distinct-col-values.html

Use bash history with process substitution
Bash has a great history system of its commands accessed by the ! built-in history expansion operator (documented elsewhere on this site or on the web). You can combine the ! operator inside the process redirection

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

extract email adresses from some file (or any other pattern)
find all email addresses in a file, printing each match. Addresses do not have to be alone on a line etc. For example you can grab them from HTML-formatted emails or CSV files, etc. Use a combination of $...|sort|uniq$ to filter them.

Perform a reverse DNS lookup
Performs a reverse DNS lookup, variants include: $ nslookup 74.125.45.100 or: $ host 74.125.45.100

Query an NFS host for its list of exports

RDP through SSH tunnel
This command will: 1. open an SSH tunnel to 2. go to background 3. wait for 10 seconds for the connection 4. during the 10 seconds wait it will localy run 'rdesktop' to connect to the remote host through the created SSH tunnel. Password-less log in can be achieved (when server allows it) by adding '-p ' to the 'rdesktop' command

disable caps lock
a quick one-line way to disable caps lock while running X.

kill some process (same as others) but parsing to a variable
Kills a process matching program. I suggest using $ pgrep -fl program to avoid over-killings Nice the following: kills all bash process owned by guest $ pkill -9 -f bash -u guest


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