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Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Find the package that installed a command

find files containing text
-l outputs only the file names -i ignores the case -r descends into subdirectories

Test how well a web server handles concurrent connections and big load.
This command will execute 1000 requests to the http URL http://127.0.0.1:8000 handlink 100 concurent connections at a time. Then it will display statistics about the time that have been taken.

Print current runlevel
Prints current runlevel and system start time. On older systems it also shows the last init state. Pretty useful on remote systems, pretty useless on local ones :)

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"

Grab IP address on machine with multiple interfaces
Instead of hard-coding in a check to scrape info from ifconfig based on a specific interface, do it in a more portable way. This works really well if you switch between wired, wireless, bluetooth or even VPN connections. You can get your current IP in a script (since it'll be something like tun0 instead of eth0 or wlan1). This uses a well known public ip address 8.8.8.8, but it doesn't actually connect to it, it just shows you the route it would take.

Simple Video Surveillance by email
This takes a picture (with the web cam) every 5 minutes, and send the picture to your e-mail. Some systems support mail -a "References: " so that all video surveillance emails are grouped in a single email thread. To keep your inbox clean, it is still possible to filter and move to trash video surveillance emails (and restore these emails only if you really get robbed!) For instance with Gmail, emails sent to me+trash@gmail.com can be filtered with "Matches: DeliveredTo:me+trash@gmail.com"

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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