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Quickly re-execute a recent command in bash
! will expand to the last time you ran , options and all. It's a nicer alternative to ^R for simple cases, and it's quite helpful for those long commands you run every now and then and haven't made aliases or functions for. It's similar to command 3966, in some sense.

Report bugs in Ubuntu
As of 10.04 LTS, you need to use this command-line to reports bugs to the launchpad.net tracking system (you need a launchpad acct for this to work). This command is preferred over using the website because it collects/sends info about your system to help developers. ubuntu-bug is a symlink to apport-bug which sees if KDE/Gnome is running and calls apport-gtk/apport-kde dialogs, otherwise apport-cli, so you can fill out a bug report. First run 'ubuntu-bug' without args to see a list of known symptoms. If there's no matching symptom, or you know which package is to blame, then run 'ubuntu-bug <package>'. If the process is still running, use 'ubuntu-bug <PID>'

Encode/Decode text to/from Base64 on a Mac w/out Mac Ports
I have a mac, and do not want to install mac ports to get the base64 binary. Using openssl will do the trick just fine. Note, to decode base64, specify a '-d' after 'base64' in the command. Note also the files base64.decoded.txt and base64.encoded.txt are text files.

Capture data in ASCII. 1500 bytes
Sniffing traffic on port 80 only the first 1500 bytes

Equivalent to ifconfig -a in HPUX

Parallel file downloading with wget
xargs can be used in this manner to download multiple files at a time, and xargs will in this case run 10 processes at a time and initiate a new one when the number running falls below 10.

Convert an image sequence into a video

Use socat to emulate an SMTP mail SERVER
Lots of scripts show you how to use socat to send an email to an SMTP server; this command actually emulates an SMTP server! It assumes the client is only sending to one recipient, and it's not at all smart, but it'll capture the email into a log file and the client will stop retrying. I used this to diagnose what emails were being sent by cron and subsequently discarded, but you can use it for all sorts of things.

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

Email a file to yourself
This uses mutt to send the file, and doesn't require uuencode etc


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