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Backup a remote database to your local filesystem
I have this on a daily cronjob to backup the commandlinefu.com database from NearlyFreeSpeech.net (awesome hosts by the way) to my local drive. Note that (on my Ubuntu system at least) you need to escape the % signs on the crontab.

Rename files in batch

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"

Post a message to another users screen via SSH
Post a message on another users screen via SSH

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

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"

Simple example of the trap command

Remove a range of lines from a file
Delete a range of line

Delicious search with human readable output
You can install filterous with $ sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev; sudo easy_install -U filterous

Restore mysql database uncompressing on the fly.
This way you keep the file compressed saving disk space. Other way less optimal using named pipes: mysql -uroot -p'passwd' database <


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