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files and directories in the last 1 hour
added alias in ~/.bashrc alias lf='find ./* -ctime -1 | xargs ls -ltr --color'

Monitor the queries being run by MySQL
Watch is a very useful command for periodically running another command - in this using mysqladmin to display the processlist. This is useful for monitoring which queries are causing your server to clog up. More info here: http://codeinthehole.com/archives/2-Monitoring-MySQL-processes.html

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Fill a hard drive with ones - like zero-fill, but the opposite :)
Note: Replace 200000 with drive bytes/512, and /dev/sdx with the destination drive/partition. ;) Note: You may need to install pipebench, this is easy with "sudo apt-get install pipebench" on Ubuntu. The reason I hunted around for the pieces to make up this command is that I wanted to specifically flip all of the bits on a new HDD, before running an Extended SMART Self-Test (actually, the second pass, as I've already done one while factory-zeroed) to ensure there are no physical faults waiting to compromise my valuable data. There were several sites that came up in a Google search which had a zero-fill command with progress indicator, and one or two with a fill-with-ones command, but none that I could find with these two things combined (I had to shuffle around the dd command(s) to get this to happen without wasting speed on an md5sum as well). For reference, these are the other useful-looking commands I found in my search: Zero-fill drive "/dev/sdx", with progress indicator and md5 verification (run sudo fdisk -l to get total disk bytes, then divide by 512 and enter the resulting value into this command for a full wipe) $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count= | pipebench | sudo tee /dev/sdx | md5sum And this command for creating a file filled with ones is my other main source (besides the above command and man pages, that is - I may be a Linux newbie but I do read!): $ tr '\000' '\377' < /dev/zero | dd of=allones bs=1024 count=2k Hope someone finds this useful! :) Cheers, - Gliktch

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 ;)

See entire packet payload using tcpdump.
This command will show you the entire payload of a packet. The final "s" increases the snaplength, grabbing the whole packet.

Pull up remote desktop for other than gnome/kde eg fluxbox
If the remote doesn't export its desktop (eg fluxbox, blackbox etc) then you need to run a x11vnc server there and a vncviewer at the local end. This command does the lot for you - it assumes that you can 'ssh' to the box without a password and that x11vnc is installed at the remote end.

Check if x86 Solaris based system is 32bit or 64bit
This is likely only valid on Solaris based systems. Unfortunately a lot of the more universal techniques for determining if a system is 32bit or 64bit on x86 solaris fail to give much more information than "i86pc"

concat multiple videos into one (and add an audio track)
This is an extract from a larger script which formats the video for DVD. The videos I use have no audio track so I need to add one. Tweak as you like...

Write and read HDD external
Write and read HDD external FreeBSD


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