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Extract multiple tar files at once in zsh
tar doesn't support wildcard for unpacking (so you can't use tar -xf *.tar) and it's shorter and simpler than for i in *.tar;do tar -xf $i;done (or even 'for i in *.tar;tar -xf $i' in case of zsh) -i says tar not to stop after first file (EOF)

Get a range of SVN revisions from svn diff and tar gz them
Handy when you need to create a list of files to be updated when subversion is not available on the remote host. You can take this tar file, and upload and extract it where you need it. Replace M and N with the revisions specific to yours. Make sure you do this from an updated (svn up) working directory.

Quick directory bookmarks
Set a bookmark as normal shell variable $ p=/cumbersome/path/to/project To go there $ to p This saves one "$" and is faster to type ;-) The variable is still useful as such: $ vim $p/ will expand the variable (at least in bash) and show a list of files to edit. If setting the bookmarks is too much typing you could add another function $ bm() { eval $1=$(pwd); } then bookmark the current directory with $ bm p

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Alternative way to generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password usig sed
This is what I came up to generate XKCD #936 style four-word password. Since first letter of every word is capitalized it looks a bit more readable to my eyes. Also strips single quotes. And yes - regex is a bit of a kludge, but that's the bes i could think of.

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

output stats from a running dd command to see its progress
if you start a large dd and forgot about statistics, but you still wonder what the progress is this command in an OTHER terminal will show you the way. NOTE: the watch command by itself will not output anything NOTE: the kill command will not kill the process

command shell generate random strong password
shell generate random strong password

Reverse SSHfs mount,
While `sshfs $REMOTE_HOST:$REMOTE_PATH $LOCAL_PATH` "pulls" a directory from the remote server to the local host, the above command does the reverse and "pushes" a directory from the local host to the remote server. This makes use of the "slave" option of sshfs which instructs it to communicate over plain stdin/stdout and the `dpipe` tool from vde2 to connect the sftp-server stdout to the sshfs stdin and vice-versa.

ssh batch jobs: query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command
Need to query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command ? Of course you'll have setup keys on all your remote HOSTs. But in the case a key is not present this command will skip that node, proceeding on to the next. -t: Force pseudo-tty allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine. Also prevents unwanted stty messages being sent to console -q: Quiet mode. -o "BatchMode yes" If set to yes, passphrase/password querying will be disabled. This option is useful in scripts and other batch jobs where no user is present


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