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Quickly re-execute a recent command in bash
! will expand to the last time you ran , options and all. It's a nicer alternative to ^R for simple cases, and it's quite helpful for those long commands you run every now and then and haven't made aliases or functions for. It's similar to command 3966, in some sense.

Generate a random password 30 characters long
Find random strings within /dev/urandom. Using grep filter to just Alphanumeric characters, and then print the first 30 and remove all the line feeds.

Get a MySQL DB dump from a remote machine
This command will dump a database on a remote stream to stdout, compress it, stream it to your local machine, decompress it and put it into a file called database.sql.You could even pipe it into mysql on your local machine to restore it immediately. I had to use this recently because the server I needed a backup from didn't have enough disk space.

Check for login failures and summarize
This command checks for the number of times when someone has tried to login to your server and failed. If there are a lot, then that user is being targeted on your system and you might want to make sure that user either has remote logins disabled, or has a strong password, or both. If your output has an "invalid" line, it is a summary of all logins from users that don't exist on your system.

Change user within ssh session retaining the current MIT cookie for X-forwarding
When you remotely log in like "ssh -X userA:host" and become a different user with "su UserB", X-forwarding will not work anymore since /home/UserB/.Xauthority does not exist. This will use UserA's information stored in .Xauthority for UserB to enable X-forwarding. Watch http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2008/04/05/respect-my-xauthority/ for details.

search for a file in PATH

Dumping Audio stream from flv (using mplayer)

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
This handles when you have a single call or channel. Other commands will strip out the result if there is a single channel or call active because the output changes the noun to be singular instead of plural.

convert video format to youtube flv format


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