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Periodically run a command without hangups, and send the output to your e-mail
Run "ps -x" (process status) in the background every hour (in this example). The outputs of both "nohup" and "ps -x" are sent to the e-mail (instead of nohup.out and stdout and stderr). If you like it, replace "ps -x" by the command of your choice, replace 3600 (1 hour) by the period of your choice. You can run the command in the loop any time by killing the sleep process. For example $ ps -x 2925 ? S 0:00.00 sh -c unzip E.zip >/dev/null 2>&1 11288 ? O 0:00.00 unzip E.zip 25428 ? I 0:00.00 sleep 3600 14346 pts/42- I 0:00.01 bash -c while true; do ps -x | mail (...); sleep 3600; done 643 pts/66 Ss 0:00.03 -bash 14124 pts/66 O+ 0:00.00 ps -x $ kill 25428 You have mail in /mail/(...)

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

Perl one-liner to determine number of days since the Unix epoch
There are some environments that use this value for password and account expiration. It's helpful to be able to quickly determine the number of days since the Unix epoch (dse) when working directly with the configuration files as an administrator.

Label EXT2/EXT3 File System

Block the 6700 worst spamhosts
The above url contains over 6700 of the common ad websites. The command just pastes these into your /etc/hosts.

Delete empty directories
Recursively delete empty directories. Use with care.

Efficiently extract lines between markers
GNU Sed can 'address' between two regex, but it continues parsing through to the end of the file. This slight alteration causes it to terminate reading the input file once the STOP match is made. In my example I have included an extra '/START/d' as my 'start' marker line contains the 'stop' string (I'm extracting data between 'resets' and using the time stamp as the 'start'). My previous coding using grep is slightly faster near the end of the file, but overall (extracting all the reset cycles in turn) the new SED method is quicker and a lot neater.

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

send a circular

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"


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