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escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command

Search big files with long lines
This is a handy way to circumvent the "Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded" grep error. Once you have run the above command (or put it in your .bashrc), files can be searched using: $ lgrep search-string /file/to/search

Get list of servers with a specific port open
Change the -p argument for the port number. See "man nmap" for different ways to specify address ranges.

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" }

du and sort to find the biggest directories in defined filesystem
I had the problem that our monitoring showed that the "/" filesystem is >90% full. This command helped me to find out fast which subdirs are the biggest. The system has many NFS-mounts therefore the -x.

create a nicely formatted example of a shell command and its output
Shell function which takes a bash command as its input, and displays the following formatted output: EXAMPLE: command OUTPUT: output from command

bash: hotkey to put current commandline to text-editor
* in bash-shell You can capture the current commandline to a text-editor: * simply press: CTRL+x+e * Your current commandline will pe put into Your default text-editor (export EDITOR=vim)

list files recursively by size

Report bugs in Ubuntu
As of 10.04 LTS, you need to use this command-line to reports bugs to the launchpad.net tracking system (you need a launchpad acct for this to work). This command is preferred over using the website because it collects/sends info about your system to help developers. ubuntu-bug is a symlink to apport-bug which sees if KDE/Gnome is running and calls apport-gtk/apport-kde dialogs, otherwise apport-cli, so you can fill out a bug report. First run 'ubuntu-bug' without args to see a list of known symptoms. If there's no matching symptom, or you know which package is to blame, then run 'ubuntu-bug <package>'. If the process is still running, use 'ubuntu-bug <PID>'

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" }


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