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check open ports without netstat or lsof

Find public IP when behind a random router (also see description)
Depends on GET. You can also replace GET with curl, or `wget -qO -` if GET isn't available.

Change pidgin status
Changes pidgin status using its dbus interface. The status code can be obtained using command #4543.

Clear terminal Screen

a trash function for bash
Every rm'ed a file you needed? Of course you haven't. But I have. I got sick of it so I created a bash function. Here it is. It'll put trashed files into a $HOME/.Trash/"date" folder according to the date. I have rm aliased to it as well in my bashrc so that I still use the rm command. It'll choke if you attempt to trash a directory if that directory name is already in the Trash. This rarely happens in my case but it's easy enough to add another test and to mv the old dir if necessary. function trash(){ if [ -z "$*" ] ; then echo "Usage: trash filename" else DATE=$( date +%F ) [ -d "${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE}" ] || mkdir -p ${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE} for FILE in $@ ; do mv "${FILE}" "${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE}" echo "${FILE} trashed!" done fi }

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Identify differences between directories (possibly on different servers)
This can be much faster than downloading one or both trees to a common servers and comparing the files there. After, only those files could be copied down for deeper comparison if needed.

follow the content of all files in a directory
The `-q' arg forces tail to not output the name of the current file

Browse system RAM in a human readable form
This command lets you see and scroll through all of the strings that are stored in the RAM at any given time. Press space bar to scroll through to see more pages (or use the arrow keys etc). Sometimes if you don't save that file that you were working on or want to get back something you closed it can be found floating around in here! The awk command only shows lines that are longer than 20 characters (to avoid seeing lots of junk that probably isn't "human readable"). If you want to dump the whole thing to a file replace the final '| less' with '> memorydump'. This is great for searching through many times (and with the added bonus that it doesn't overwrite any memory...). Here's a neat example to show up conversations that were had in pidgin (will probably work after it has been closed)... $sudo cat /proc/kcore | strings | grep '([0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\})' (depending on sudo settings it might be best to run $sudo su first to get to a # prompt)

computes the most frequent used words of a text file
using $ cat WAR_AND_PEACE_By_LeoTolstoi.txt | tr -cs "[:alnum:]" "\n"| tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sort -S16M | uniq -c |sort -nr | cat -n | head -n 30 ("sort -S1G" - Linux/GNU sort only) will also do the job but as some drawbacks (caused by space/time complexity of sorting) for bigger files...


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