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Create a persistent connection to a machine
Create a persistent SSH connection to the host in the background. Combine this with settings in your ~/.ssh/config: Host host ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster no All the SSH connections to the machine will then go through the persisten SSH socket. This is very useful if you are using SSH to synchronize files (using rsync/sftp/cvs/svn) on a regular basis because it won't create a new socket each time to open an ssh connection.

dump database from postgresql to a file

Ctrl+S Ctrl+Q terminal output lock and unlock
These are simple shortcuts to pause and continue terminal output, works in most terminals and screen multiplexers like screen. You can use it to catch something if things change too fast, and scroll with Shift + PgUp PgDown. On linux console ScrollLock can also be used.

Nice info browser
pinfo package provide a nice info alternative based on ncurses.

create a simple version of ls with extended output
create a short alias for 'ls' with multi-column (-C), file type syntax additions (slashes after directories, @ for symlinks, etc... (-F), long format (-l), including hidden directories (all ./, ../, .svn, etc) (-a), show file-system blocks actually in use (-s), human readable file sizes (-h)

Quickly analyze apache logs for top 25 most common IP addresses.
This command is much quicker than the alternative of "sort | uniq -c | sort -n".

rename / move Uppercase filenames to lowercase filenames current directory
move filename/rename filenames with Uppercase to lowercase in current directory

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"

compare two Microsoft Word documents
http://meld.sourceforge.net/ http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

Check if a domain is available and get the answer in just one line
Returns nothing if the domain exists and 'No match for domain.com' otherwise.


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