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Email a file to yourself
This works on Solaris 10.

Create arbitrary big file full of zeroes but done in a second
If you want to create fast a very big file for testing purposes and you do not care about its content, then you can use this command to create a file of arbitrary size within less than a second. Content of file will be all zero bytes. The trick is that the content is just not written to the disk, instead the space for it is somehow reserved on operating system level and file system level. It would be filled when first accessed/written (not sure about the mechanism that lies below, but it makes the file creation super fast). Instead of '1G' as in the example, you could use other modifiers like 200K for kilobytes (1024 bytes), 500M for megabytes (1024 * 1024 bytes), 20G for Gigabytes (1024*1024*1024 bytes), 30T for Terabytes (1024^4 bytes). Also P for Penta, etc... Command tested under Linux.

Tail -f at your own pace
The -s option allows you to specify the update interval

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Find the package that installed a command

ignore the .svn directory in filename completion
When browsing java source code (for example) it's really annoying having to type the first letter of the package when there is only one package in the subdir. man bash for more info about FIGNORE

Factory reset your harddrive. (BE CAREFUL!)

List PCI device with class and vendor/device IDs
This is a quick replacement for lspci if you need to know what's in a given system but pciutils is not installed. You then need something that can look up the IDs from pci.ids if you want the verbose output.

Grab a list of MP3s out of Firefox's cache
Ever gone to a site that has an MP3 embedded into a pesky flash player, but no download link? Well, this one-liner will yank the names of those tunes straight out of FF's cache in a nice, easy to read list. What you do with them after that is *ahem* no concern of mine. ;)

Diff on two variables
You got some results in two variables within your shell script and would like to find the differences? Changes in process lists, reworked file contents, ... . No need to write to temporary files. You can use all the diff parameters you'll need. Maybe anything like $ grep "^>" is helpful afterwards.


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