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Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off with 1 command!
Running this command turns shell tracing and shell verbose debugging on or off. Not only does it do that, it also uses your terminals builtin method of setting colors to make debugging much easier. It looks at the current shell options contained in the $- special bash variable and that lets this function set the opposite of the current value. So from the shell you could do a: $ setx; echo "y" | ( cat -t ) | echo "d"; setx and it will turn on debbuggin. This is an amazingly useful function that is perfect to add system-wide by adding it to /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc.. You can run it from the shell, and you can also use it in your shell scripts like my .bash_profile - http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

use the previous commands params in the current command
Here the !!:1 will take the first parameter from the previous command. This can be used in conjunction with other history commands like ! and so on.

Search for packages, ranked by popularity
This will take the packages matching a given `apt-cache search` query (a collection of AND'd words or regexps) and tell you how popular they are. This is particularly nice for those times you have to figure out which solution to use for e.g. a PDF reader or a VNC client. Substitute "ubuntu.com" for "debian.org" if you want this to use Ubuntu's data instead. Everything else will work perfectly.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

grep expression (perl regex) to extract all ip addresses from both ip and ifconfig commands output
It uses the following GNU grep options: "-o" which shows only the matching part of the line and "-P" which allows the use of Perl regular expressions.

list files recursively by size

Repeat a command until stopped
In this case it runs the command 'curl localhost:3000/site/sha' waiting the amount of time in sleep, ie: 1 second between runs, appending each run to the console. This works well for any command where the output is less than your line width This is unlike watch, because watch always clears the display.

Mac OS X: remove extra languages to save over 3 GB of space.
This will get the job done in the most efficient way - spawning only one `rm` process. "On-the-fly" find data is displayed through `tee` and you should have plenty of time to ctrl-c if needed before it's too late. You may need to re-run this after major Software Updates. To leave more languages in, add more ``-and \! -iname "lang*"'' statements: $ sudo find / -iname "*.lproj" -and \! -iname "en*" -and \! -iname "spanish*" -print0 | tee /dev/stderr | sudo xargs -0 rm -rfv **Edit: note the 2nd sudo near the end of the pipeline - this is necessary.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

a fast way to repeat output a byte
the speed is about 500MB/s on my machine. i think it's fast enough to output not too many bytes. while a C program may output 1GB per sencond on my machine. if the size is not the power of 512,you may change the bs and count in dd.


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