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Backup a directory structure
Copies a directory structure from /home/ to /backups/home (notice that the destination does not have a trailing slash)

Port scan a range of hosts with Netcat.
Simple one-liner for scanning a range of hosts, you can also scan a range of ports with Netcat by ex.: nc -v -n -z -w 1 192.168.0.1 21-443 Useful when Nmap is not available:) Range declaration like X..X "for i in {21..29}" is only works with bash 3.0+

Change every instance of OLD to NEW in file FILE
Very quick way to change a word in a file. I use it all the time to change variable names in my PHP scripts (sed -i 's/$oldvar/$newvar/g' index.php)

Lookup errno defintions
Calls the POSIX strerror() function to look up the meaning of integer ERRNOs set by some functions.

Get just the IP for a hostname
has the benefit of being a bit more cross-platform.

Get just the IP for a hostname

prevent large files from being cached in memory (backups!)
We all know... $ nice -n19 for low CPU priority.   $ ionice -c3 for low I/O priority.   nocache can be useful in related scenarios, when we operate on very large files just a single time, e.g. a backup job. It advises the kernel that no caching is required for the involved files, so our current file cache is not erased, potentially decreasing performance on other, more typical file I/O, e.g. on a desktop.   http://askubuntu.com/questions/122857 https://github.com/Feh/nocache http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=nocache http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=nocache   To undo caching of a single file in hindsight, you can do $ cachedel   To check the cache status of a file, do $ cachestats

Lock your KDE4 remotely (via regular KDE lock)
Forgot to lock your computer? Want to lock it via SSH or mobile phone or use it for scheduled lock? TIP: Make a alias for this (e. g. as "lock"). I found some howtos for ugly X11 lock, but this will use regular KDE locking utility. Note that KDE 3 is using utility with another name (I guess with the same argument --forcelock) Tested on Kubuntu 8.10. Stay tuned for remote unlock.

tree by modify time with newest file at bottom
Go look at sample output first This is kind of like the ls command but displays by modify time with size, date and color. The newest files at the bottom of the screen (reverse using tac)

Print number of mb of free ram
This will show the amount of physical RAM that is left unused by the system.


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