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Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Do quick arithmetic on numbers from STDIN with any formatting using a perl one liner.
Good for summing the numbers embedded in text - a food journal entry for example with calories listed per food where you want the total calories. Use this to monitor and keep a total on anything that ouputs numbers.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Random quote from Borat -- no html parsing
Turns out smacie.com has a text file containing every single one of the borat quotes, each one on a newline. This makes it very convenient, as this can be done without any sed-parsing, and uses less bandwitdth! Note that borate quotes are quite offensive, much more so than "fortunes-off"!

bash script to zip a folder while ignoring git files and copying it to dropbox
Better tool for exporting git's repository is Git itself!

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
This version uses netcat to check a particular service.

Create a directory and cd into it
This creates a bash function `take` that you can call with the name of the directory as the first parameter. Add the function to ~/.bashrc to have it available anytime.

Play musical notes from octave of middle C
Are there any creative pieces of music that can be created using beep and the shell? I'd love to hear it!

Cropping a video file in ffmpeg

Shows physically connected drives (SCSI or SATA)
This will show all physically connected SATA (and SCSI) drives on your system. This is particularly useful when troubleshooting hard disks.... or when a mount point seems to be missing.


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