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Determine MAC address of remote host when you know its IP address
arping sends ARP requests to a neighboring host. This won't work if there is an ARP subnet gateway in the middle. If there is, you'll just get the gateway's MAC address not the host's address you are really trying to get to.

Find your graphics chipset
Displays only the VGA adapter/chipset being used for the graphics. In this case, it gave me the "M22" and "Mobility Radeon x300" that I needed to research a graphics issue I was having.

Position the cursor under the current directory line
In case you're like me and like your commands to start on clean lines, especially when you're deep into a 10-level directory tree. This can be added to .bashrc.

Diff files over SSH
Sometimes you need to compare two config files on different servers. Put the file names into the above script and let 'er rip.

processes per user counter
enumerates the number of processes for each user. ps BSD format is used here , for standard Unix format use : ps -eLf |awk '{$1} {++P[$1]} END {for(a in P) if (a !="UID") print a,P[a]}'

Temporarily ignore known SSH hosts
you may create an alias also, which I did ;-) alias sshu="ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null "

Find Out My Linux Distribution Name and Version

Record and share your terminal
It replays plain text terminal screencast from http://shelr.tv/

Extract a bash function
I often need to extract a function from a bash script and this command will do it.

Single use vnc-over-ssh connection
This command 1. SSH into a machine 2. Tunnels VNC port to your local computer ("-L 5900:localhost:5900") 3. Runs a single use vnc server ("x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0") 4. Goes into the background ("-f") 5. Runs VNC viewer on the local computer connecting to the remote machine via the newly created SSH tunnel ("vinagre localhost:5900")


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