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determine if tcp port is open
for udp nmap -sU -p 80 hostname

Show a curses based menu selector
Not so much handy by itself, but very nice in shell scripts. This makes you a handy ncurses based checklist. Much like terminal installers, just use the arrow keys and hit 'Space' to adjust the selections. Returns all selected tags as strings, with no newline at the end. So, your output will be something like: "one" "two" "three" "four" "etc" For those who prefer bash expansion over gratuitious typing: $ whiptail --checklist "Simple checkbox menu" 12 35 3 $(echo {one,two,three,four}" '' 0"} ) Things to note: The height must includes the outer border and padding: add 7 to however many items you want to show up at the same time. If the status is 1, it will be selected by default. anything else, will be deselected.

display emerge.log date in a human friendly way
gentoo only or gentoo-like linux distributions.

Shows a specific process memory usage

grep compressed log files without extracting
accomplishes the same thing without unzipping the whole file, and while i have never seen a log.tar.gz file that was a binary, i will concede that it might happen, so add the -a in there: $zgrep -ia "string" log.tar.gz it's still shorter/easier to type...

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully

Send email with curl and gmail
Required curl version >=7.21; using ~/.netrc for authorization

list all file extensions in a directory
If your grep doesn't have an -o option, you can use sed instead.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Map the slot of an I/O card to its PCI bus address
Recent hardware may or may not enumerate *both of* these values


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