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Block an IP address from connecting to a server
This appends (-A) a new rule to the INPUT chain, which specifies to drop all packets from a source (-s) IP address.

force unsupported i386 commands to work on amd64
The above was done using the i386 flashplayer plugin, and was installed on a AMD64 machine running an AMD64 kernel and AMD64 programs. the resulting plugin install ultimately didn't work for swiftfox (but worked for iceweasel) without also covering it with a nspluginwrapper which took a bit of fenangaling to get to work (lots of apt-getting) but it is a nice feature to be able to trick installers that think you need i386 into running on a amd64, or at least attempting to run on amd64. Enjoy

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

converting vertical line to horizontal line

Create more threads with less stack space
default stack size is 10M. This makes your multithread app filling rapidly your memory. on my PC I was able to create only 300thread with default stack size. Lower the default stack size to the one effectively used by your threads, let you create more. ex. putting 64k I was able to create more than 10.000threads. Obviously ...your thread shouldn't need more than 64k ram!!!

A fun thing to do with ram is actually open it up and take a peek. This command will show you all the string (plain text) values in ram

seconds since epoch to ISO timestamp
No need to use perl, awk, nor /usr/bin/date -- bash's "printf" builtin will do it.

Edit the last or previous command line in an editor then execute
If you would like to edit a previous command, which might be long and complicated, you can use the fc (I think it stands for fix command). Invoke fc alone will edit the last command using the default editor (specified by $FCEDIT, $EDITOR, or emacs, in that order). After you make the changes in the editor, save and exit to execute that command. The fc command is more flexible than what I have described. Please 'man bash' for more information.

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.


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