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Customize time format of 'ls -l'
the --time-style argument to 'ls' takes several possible modifiers: full-iso, long-iso, iso, locale, +FORMAT. The +FORMAT modifier uses the same syntax as date +FORMAT. --time-style=+"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" strikes a happy medium between accuracy and verbosity: $ ls -lart --time-style=long-iso doesn't show time down to the nearest second, $ ls -lart --time-style=full-iso displays time to 10E-9 second resolution, but with no significant digits past the full seconds, also showing the timezone: $ -rw-r--r-- 1 bchittenden bchittenden 0 2011-02-10 12:07:55.000000000 -0500 bar

read squid logs with human-readable timestamp

diff directories, quick cut and paste to view the changes
We use this to quickly highlight differences and provide a quick way to cut and paste the command to view the files using the marvellous vimdiff

pipe output of a command to your clipboard
In turn you can get the contents of your clipboard by typing xsel by itself with no arguments: $ xsel This command requires you to install the xsel utility which is free

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Check if x509 certificate file and rsa private key match
A x509 certificate and a rsa key file have in common a parameter called modulus, it is a very long hexadecimal number. That value is unique for each certficate / key pair. The command allows to do the check of this pair of values in a script using a great feature of bash. "

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

Display error pages in report format
This command will return a full list of Error 404 pages in the given access log. The following variables have been given to awk Hostname ($2), ERROR Code ($9), Missing Item ($7), Referrer ($11) You can then send this into a file (>> /path/to/file), which you can open with OpenOffice as a CSV

show hidden chars in vi

Show numerical values for each of the 256 colors in ZSH
This will show a numerical value for each of the 256 colors in ZSH. Everything in the command is a ZSH builtin, so it should run on any platform where ZSH is installed. Prints one color per line. If someone is interested in formatting the output, paste the alternative.


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