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Synchronise a file from a remote server
You will be prompted for a password unless you have your public keys set-up.

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

Show the UUID of a filesystem or partition
Show the UUID-based alternate device names of ZEVO-related partitions on Darwin/OS X. Adapted from the lines by dbrady at http://zevo.getgreenbytes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=700#p700 and following the disk device naming scheme at http://zevo.getgreenbytes.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Site.DiskDeviceNames

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Securely destroy data on given device hugely faster than /dev/urandom
This command generates a pseudo-random data stream using aes-256-ctr with a seed set by /dev/urandom. Redirect to a block device for secure data scrambling.

Perl one-liner to determine number of days since the Unix epoch
There are some environments that use this value for password and account expiration. It's helpful to be able to quickly determine the number of days since the Unix epoch (dse) when working directly with the configuration files as an administrator.

Show battery infomations for OS X 10.5.x

Map the slot of an I/O card to its PCI bus address
Recent hardware may or may not enumerate *both of* these values

Search for a single file and go to it
This command looks for a single file named emails.txt which is located somewhere in my home directory and cd to that directory. This command is especially helpful when the file is burried deep in the directory structure. I tested it against the bash shells in Xubuntu 8.10 and Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6

create a progress bar...
A simple way yo do a progress bar like wget.


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