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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"

Batch File Rename with awk and sed

Url Encode

Runs a command without hangups.
The improvement is that you can re-attach to the screen at a later point.

Rename a file with a random name
Give files a random name (don't ask why :-) The function will rename files but maintain their extensions. BUG: If a file doesn't have an extension it will end up with a dot at the end of the name. The parameter '8' for pwgen controls the length of filenames - eight random characters.

Sync MySQL Servers via secure SSH-tunnel
I wanted to keep a backup of my company database server on my local homeserver. After I found maatkit to sync databases, everything except security seemed fine. SSH takes care of that part.

Cleanup Python bytecode files
This command will erase all bytecode versions of Python modules under the current directory.

Tar - Compress by excluding folders
If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space. Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting. This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".

Find broken symlinks
Locate broken symlinks in the current directory. Also useful, to remove broken links: $ find . -type l ! -exec test -e {} \; -print0 | xargs -0 rm

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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