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Create a persistent connection to a machine
Create a persistent SSH connection to the host in the background. Combine this with settings in your ~/.ssh/config: Host host ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster no All the SSH connections to the machine will then go through the persisten SSH socket. This is very useful if you are using SSH to synchronize files (using rsync/sftp/cvs/svn) on a regular basis because it won't create a new socket each time to open an ssh connection.

Count opening and closing braces in a string.
This function counts the opening and closing braces in a string. This is useful if you have eg long boolean expressions with many braces and you simply want to check if you didn't forget to close one.

Get IP address from domain
I'm not sure how reliable this command is, but it works for my needs. Here's also a variant using grep. nslookup www.example.com | grep "^Address: " | awk '{print $2}'

Merge several pdf files into a single file

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

tar and remove files which are older that 100 days
tar does not have a -mtime option as find. tar appends all the file to an existing tar file.

Print just line 4 from a textfile
this method should be the fastest

Huh? Where did all my precious space go ?
Sort ls output of all files in current directory in ascending order Just the 20 biggest ones: $ ls -la | sort -k 5bn | tail -n 20 A variant for the current directory tree with subdirectories and pretty columns is: $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -la | sort -k 5bn | column -t And finding the subdirectories consuming the most space with displayed block size 1k: $ du -sk ./* | sort -k 1bn | column -t

The wisdom of Cave Johnson
There's been a similar Futurama thing around for a while, which grabs a quote from the /. headers [curl -Ism3 slashdot.org | egrep "^X-(F|B|L)" | cut -d \- -f 2- | fmt -w $(tput cols)]. Same deal, but more likely to stop working when someone forgets to pay the bill on the domain. Until then: Cave Johnson!

Fast portscanner via Parallel


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