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Simple XML tag extract with sed
Limited, but useful construct to extract text embedded in XML tags. This will only work if bar is all on one line. If nobody posts an alternative for the multiline sed version, I'll figure it out later...

write the output of a command to /var/log/user.log... each line will contain $USER, making this easy to grep for.
This command is useful if you want to copy the output of a series of commands to a file, for example if you want to pastebin the output from 'uname -a', 'lspci -vvv' and 'lsmod' for video driver trouble-shooting on your favorite Linux forum. 'log' takes all the following arguments as a command to execute, with STDOUT sent to /var/log/user.log. The command is echoed to the log before it is executed. The advantages of using logger (as opposed to appending output from commands to a file) are 1) commands are always appended to the logs... you don't have to worry about clobbering your log file accidentally by using '>' rather than '>>' 2) logs are automatically cleaned up by logrotate. The following functions allow you to mark the start and end of a section of /var/log/user.log. $ startlog() { export LOGMARK=$(date +%Y.%m.%d_%H:%M:%S); echo "$LOGMARK.START" | logger -t $USER; } then $ endlog() { echo "$LOGMARK.END" | logger -t $USER; } printlog will print all lines between $LOGMARK.START and $LOGMARK.END, removing everything that is prepended to each line by logger. $ printlog() { sudo sed -n -e "/$LOGMARK.START/,/$LOGMARK.END/p" /var/log/user.log| sed "s/.*$USER: //"; } The following command should dump just about all the information that you could possibly want about your linux configuration into the clipboard. $ startlog; for cmd in 'uname -a' 'cat /etc/issue' 'dmesg' 'lsusb' 'lspci' 'sudo lshw' 'lsmod'; do log $cmd; done; endlog; printlog | xsel --clipboard This is ready for a trip to http://pastebin.com/, and you don't have to worry about leaving temporary files lying around cluttering up $HOME. Caveats: I'm sure that startlog, endlog, and printlog could use some cleanup and error checking... there are unchecked dependencies between printlog and endlog, as well as between endlog and startlog. It might be useful for 'log' to send stderr to logger as well.

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"

Ask user to confirm
Returns true if user presses the key. Use it like $ Confirm "Continue" && do action

list the top 15 folders by decreasing size in MB
list the top 15 folders by decreasing size in MB

Find files and calculate size of result in shell
Using find's internal stat to get the file size is about 50 times faster than using -exec stat.

Download an entire static website to your local machine
Very nice command when you want to download a site locally to your machine, including images, css and javascript

pipe commands from a textfile to a telnet-server with netcat
sends commands specified in $commandfile to the telnet-server specified by $telnetserver. to have newlines in $commandfile interpreted as ENTER, save the file in CR+LF (aka "Windows-Textfile") format. if you want to save the output in a separate file, use: $nc $telnetserver 23 < $commandfile > $resultfile

How many days until the end of the year

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"


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