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Run a command multiple times with different subcommands
it's nice to be able to use the command `ls program.{h,c,cpp}`. This expands to `ls program.h program.c program.cpp`. Note: This is a text expansion, not a shell wildcard type expansion that looks at matching file names to calculate the expansion. More details at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bash-brace-expansion I often run multiple commands (like apt-get) one after the other with different subcommands. Just for fun this wraps the whole thing into a single line that uses brace expansion.

Query an NFS host for its list of exports

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

rsync over ssh via non-default ssh port
tested on cygwin and Fedora 9 . good to remember for those jobs where you cannot set a site-specific connect option in your ~/.ssh/config file.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Relocate a file or directory, but keep it accessible on the old location throug a simlink.
Used for moving stuff around on a fileserver

grep binary (hexadecimal) patterns
-P activates the Perl regular expression mode.

Get your outgoing IP address
Instead of opening your browser, googling "whatismyip"... Also useful for scripts. dig can be found in the dnsutils package.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

Big (four-byte) $RANDOM
Sometimes, in a shell script, you need a random number bigger than the range of $RANDOM. This will print a random number made of four hex values extracted from /dev/urandom.


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