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watch the previous command
If you just executed some long command, like "ps -aefww | grep -i [m]yProcess", and if you don't want to retype it or cycle backwards in history and waste time quoting it, then you can use history substitution.

Random colours at random locations

commandline dictionary
Note: 1) Replace 'wonder' with any word you looking the meaning for in the above example 2) Need to install these packages: wordnet & wordnet-base (latter should be automatically installed because of dependency) 3) Combined size of packages is about 30MB on my old ubuntu system (I find it worth it)

kill all processes using a directory/file/etc
This command will kill all processes using a directory. It's quick and dirty. One may also use a -9 with kill in case regular kill doesn't work. This is useful if one needs to umount a directory.

a function to find the fastest free DNS server
Evoke from the command like as: $ timeDNS commandlinefu.com . This isn't too terribly practical, but it is a good code example of using subshells to run the queries in parallel and the use of an "anonymous function" (a/k/a "inline group") to group i/o. . I'm assuming you have already defined your local DNS cache as ${local_DNS}, (here, it's 192.168.0.1). . You do need to install `moreutils` to get `sponge`. . If you're willing to wait, a slower version w/o sponge, (and w/o sorting), is this: . DNS () { for x in "192.168.0.1" "208.67.222.222" "208.67.220.220" "198.153.192.1" "198.153.194.1" "156.154.70.1" "156.154.71.1" "8.8.8.8" "8.8.4.4"; do (echo -n "$x "; dig @"$x" "$*"|grep Query) ; done ; }

gpg decrypt several files
Change directory (cd) to the directory where all your encrypted files are placed, and then run the command - then you are asked to insert your secret gpg password - ubuntu 8.04

diff current vi buffer edits against original file

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Show display adapter, available drivers, and driver in use

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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