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Empty a file
Immediately make a file empty. This even works if the file is still being written to. Great for cleaning up huge log files!

Enter a command but keep it out of the history
Put a space in front of your command on the command line and it will not be logged as part of your command line history.

Show one line summaries of all DEB packages installed on Ubuntu based on pattern search
I sometimes want to know what packages are installed on my Ubuntu system. I still haven't figured out how to use aptitude effectively, so this is the next best thing. This allows finding by name. The grep '^ii' limits the display to only installed packages. If this is not specified, then it includes listing of non-installed packages as well.

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

Recursively remove all files in a CVS directory
This will search all directories and ignore the CVS ones. Then it will search all files in the resulting directories and act on them.

Read a tcpdump file and count SYN packets to port 80, Order column by destination.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Find distro name and/or version/release
Works for most distributions, tested on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Gentoo, SUSE, RedHat. Debian and Slackware: $cat /etc/*version

show dd progress
if you need see progress of long dd command, enter subj on other console

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"


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