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Show DeviceMapper names for LVM Volumes (to disambiguate iostat logs, etc)
Emits the device names which will be printed by iostat for an LVM volume; doesn't show the names for the underlying devices when snapshots are being used (the -cow and -real devices in /dev/mapper)

Find status of all symlinks
The symlinks command can show status of all symbolic links, including which links are dangling, which symlinks point to files on other file systems, which symlinks use ../ more than necessary, which symlinks are messy (e.g. having too many slashes or dots), etc. Other useful things it can do include removing all dangling links (-d) and converting absolute links to relative links (-c). The path given must be an absolute path (which is why I used $(pwd) in the example command).

Empty Bind9 cache
Occasionally, to force zone updating, cache flush is necessary. The use of this command is better than restart the Bind9 process.

SVN Clean
Removes all unversioned files and folders from an svn repository. Also: $ svn status --no-ignore | grep ^I | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm -rf will remove those files which svn status ignores. Handy to add to a script which is in your path so you can run it from any repository (a la 'svn_clean.sh').

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

Locate config files of the program
Locate config files of the program. May not be used for interactive programs like vim.

List files accessed by a command
Can be run as a script `ftrace` if my_command is substrituted with "$@" It is useful when running a command that fails and you have the feeling it is accessing a file you are not aware of.

geoip lookup

Have netcat listening on your ports and use telnet to test connection
This will start a netcat process listening on port 666. If you are able connect to your your server, netcat will receive the data being sent and spit it out to the screen (it may look like random garbage, so you might want to redirect it to a file).

duration of the DNS-query


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