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Do one ping to a URL, I use this in a MRTG gauge graph to monitor connectivity

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" }

Temporarily suspend and unsuspend a foreground job
Press ^Z, do what you need to do on the shell, then input % to resurrect the suspended job.

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"

Generate random valid mac addresses
Doubt it actually generates valid mac addresses but this version doesn't need any external commands so it runs much faster. Much shorter as well.

Salvage a borked terminal
If you bork your terminal by sending binary data to STDOUT or similar, you can get your terminal back using this command rather than killing and restarting the session. Note that you often won't be able to see the characters as you type them.

'hpc' in the box - starts a maximum of n compute commands modulo n controlled in parallel
the block of the loop is useful whenever you have huge junks of similar jobs, e.g., convert high res images to thumbnails, and make usage out of all the SMP power on your compute box without flooding the system. note: c is used as counter and the random sleep $ r=`echo $RANDOM%5 |bc`; echo "sleep $r"; sleep $r is just used as a dummy command.

Extended man command
This microscript looks up a man page for each word possible, and if the correct page is not found, uses w3m and Google's "I'm feeling lucky" to output a first possible result. This script was made as a result of an idea on a popular Linux forum, where users often send other people to RTFM by saying something like "man backup" or "man ubuntu one". To make this script replace the usual man command, save it as ".man.sh" in your home folder and add the following string to the end of your .bashrc file: alias man='~/.man.sh'

Watch contents of a file grow
In this case, I'm keeping an eye on /var/log/messages, but of course any file will do. When I'm following a file, I generally don't want to see anything other than what has been added due to the command or service I've executed. This keeps everything clean and tidy for troubleshooting.

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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