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du command without showing other mounted file systems

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"

Change the window title of your xterm
If you are using an xterm emulation capable terminal emulator, such as PuTTY or xterm on Linux desktop, this command will replace the title of that terminal window. I know it is not nice to have seventeen terminals on your desktop with title PuTTY, you can not tell which one is connected to which server and doing what. Even though the string between the quotes is typed as literals, it needs a little more finesse to make it work. Here is how it is done key-by-key: echo "( ctrl-v then ctrl-[ )0;Enter_Title_String_Here( ctrl-v then ctrl-g )"( enter ) ctrl-v : means hold down ctrl key and hit v at the same time like you are pasting in windoze ; also please don't type the parentheses, i.e., ( and )

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

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"

Expedient hard disk temprature and load cycle stats
This command is a great way to check to see if acpi is doing damage to your disks by agressivly parking the read arm and wearing down it's life. As you can see, mine has lost half its life. I'm sure this could be shortened though somehow. It will use smartctl to dump the stats and then grep out just the temperature and load cycles for the disk (a load cycle is when a the read arm comes out of park and wears on the drive).

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

save date and time for each command in history
Date-time format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files Using -delete is faster than: $ find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm {} + $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \;

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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