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Show when filesystem was created
Knowing when a filesystem is created , you can deduce when an operating system was installed . find filesystem device (/dev/) informations by using the cat /etc/fstab command.

Find all files currently open in Vim and/or gVim
Catches .swp, .swo, .swn, etc. If you have access to lsof, it'll give you more compressed output and show you the associated terminals (e.g., pts/5, which you could then use 'w' to figure out where it's originating from): lsof | grep '\.sw.$' If you have swp files turned off, you can do something like: ps x | grep '[g,v]im', but it won't tell you about files open in buffers, via :e [file].

Remote screenshot
Say if you're logged into a remote system via ssh and this system has an x window system, but yet you still want a screen shot of what's going on graphically. This will do it for you. :-)

get the oldest file in a directory
reverse the sorting of ls to get the newest file: $ls -1tr --group-directories-first /path/to/dir/ | tail -n 1 Problems: If there are no files in the directory you will get a directory or nothing.

Set a posix shell to echo all commands that it's about to execute, after all expansions have been done.
the 'set -x' mode can be exited by typing $ set +x

Get your default route
This gets you your default route programatically, useful for scripts

Transfer a file to multiple hosts over ssh
You can push files to up to 32 servers at once assuming ssh keys are in place. Great tool, it is part of the pssh suite.

Mount proc
Run this in / in a chroot to get your own proc there.

run a VirtualBox virtual machine without a gui
you can launch a VirtualBox VM from the command line using VBoxManage, but that invokes it in a gui environment. If you want to just fire off your VM in the background, use VBoxHeadless as shown. To get the names and UUIDs of your VirtualBox VMs, type: $ VBoxManage list

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 ;)


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