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do 'foo' until it exits successfully, pausing in between crashes
restart a buggy script when it dies. works great for "git svn fetch", which leaks memory like a sieve and eventually dies...making you restart it.

Remove last line from files recursively
Used this command recently to remove the trailing ?> from all the files in a php project, which has having some unnecessary whitespace issues. Obviously, change *.php to whatever you'd like.

Get IP from hostname
Get the IP of a hostname.

sort list of email addresses by domain.tld
email random list can be created here: https://www.randomlists.com/email-addresses

urldecoding with one pure BASH builtin
You can use ordinary printf to convert "%23%21%2fbin%2fbash" into "#!/bin/bash" with no external utilities, by using a little known printf feature -- the "%b" specifier converts shell escapes. Replace % with \x and printf will understand the urlencoded string. BASH's printf has an extension to set a variable directly, too. So you get to convert urlencoded strings from garble to plaintext in one step with no externals and no backticks.

Mapreduce style processing
parallel can be installed on your central node and can be used to run a command multiple times. In this example, multiple ssh connections are used to run commands. (-j is the number of jobs to run at the same time). The result can then be piped to commands to perform the "reduce" stage. (sort then uniq in this example). This example assumes "keyless ssh login" has been set up between the central node and all machines in the cluster. bashreduce may also do what you want.

Find the package that installed a command

check open ports
Tested in Linux and OSX

A fun thing to do with ram is actually open it up and take a peek. This command will show you all the string (plain text) values in ram

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)


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