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shows history of logins on the server
perfect on a crashed system where you can't use commands like last. for investigation purposes wtmp file can be copied over to a different server and read with utmpdump

Reverse ssh
Both hosts must be running ssh and also the outside host must have a port forwarded to port 22.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

convert a line to a space

Erase a word
hit BACKSPACE more than once to delete more words

list files recursively by size

Go (cd) directly into a new temp folder
This command create a new temp directory using mktemp (to avoid collisions) and change the current working directory to the created directory.

decoding Active Directory date format
When Ldapsearch queries an Active directory server, all the dates are shown using a timestamp of 18 digits. This perl regexp decodes them in a more human friendly notation. 11644473600 corresponds to some microsoft epoch.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

copy timestamps of files from one location to another - useful when file contents are already synced but timestamps are wrong.
Sometimes when copying files from one place to another, the timestamps get lost. Maybe you forgot to add a flag to preserve timestamps in your copy command. You're sure the files are exactly the same in both locations, but the timestamps of the files in the new home are wrong and you need them to match the source. Using this command, you will get a shell script (/tmp/retime.sh) than you can move to the new location and just execute - it will change the timestamps on all the files and directories to their previous values. Make sure you're in the right directory when you launch it, otherwise all the touch commands will create new zero-length files with those names. Since find's output includes "." it will also change the timestamp of the current directory. Ideally rsync would be the way to handle this - since it only sends changes by default, there would be relatively little network traffic resulting. But rsync has to read the entire file contents on both sides to be sure no bytes have changed, potentially causing a huge amount of local disk I/O on each side. This could be a problem if your files are large. My approach avoids all the comparison I/O. I've seen comments that rsync with the "--size-only" and "--times" options should do this also, but it didn't seem to do what I wanted in my test. With my approach you can review/edit the output commands before running them, so you can tell exactly what will happen. The "tee" command both displays the output on the screen for your review, AND saves it to the file /tmp/retime.sh. Credit: got this idea from Stone's answer at http://serverfault.com/questions/344731/rsync-copying-over-timestamps-only?rq=1, and combined it into one line.


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