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find an unused unprivileged TCP port
Not really better - just different ;) There's probably a really simple solution out there somewhere...

[git] Output remote origin from within a local repository
Great way to quickly grasp if a locally cloned repository originates from e.g. github or elsewhere.

Open screen on the previous command
I often find myself wanting to open screen on whatever command I'm currently running. Unfortunately, opening a fresh screen session spawns a new bash session, which doesn't keep my history, so calling screen directly with the previous command is the only way to go.

I hate `echo X | Y`
apart from not being generalisable to all shells, `Y <<< X` seems nicer to me than `echo X | Y`, e.g. $ <<< lol cat; it reads easier, you type less, and it also looks cool

Localize provenance of current established connections
Sample command to obtain a list of geographic localization for established connections, extracted from netstat. Need geoiplookup command ( part of geoip package under CentOS)

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Lines per second in a log file

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Generate SHA1 hash for each file in a list
All output is placed in file SHA1SUMS which you can later check with 'sha1sum --check'. Works on most Linux distros where 'sha1sum' is installed.


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