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An easter egg built into python to give you the Zen of Python

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

Solaris get PID socket
Command line to get which PID is opening a socket on IP and PORT. Only useful under Solaris.

find an unused unprivileged TCP port
Some commands (such as netcat) have a port option but how can you know which ports are unused?

Check for Firewall Blockage.
This is just one method of checking to see if an IP is blocked via IP tables or CSF. Simple and to the point. Replace xx.xx.xx.xx with the IP you wish to check.

txt2html
Convert Text to HTML

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"

Parse a quoted .csv file
The $2, $3, $4 fields are arbitrary but note that the first field starts from $2 and the last field is $NF-1. This is due to the fact that the leading and trailing quotes are treated as field delimiters.

Monitor a file with tail with timestamps added
Should be a bit more portable since echo -e/n and date's -Ins are not.


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