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faster version of ls *
I know its not much but is very useful in time consuming scripts (cron, rc.d, etc).

check open ports without netstat or lsof

watch iptables counters
Watch the number of packets/bytes coming through the firewall. Useful in setting up new iptables rules or chains. Use this output to reorder rules for efficiency.

Remove ( color / special / escape / ANSI ) codes, from text, with sed
Remove ( color / special / escape / ANSI ) codes, from text, with sed Credit to the original folks who I've copied this command from. The diff here is: Theirs: [m|K] Theirs is supposed to remove \E[NUMBERS;NUMBERS[m OR K] This statement is incorrect in 2 ways. 1. The letters m and K are two of more than 20+ possible letters that can end these sequences. 2. Inside []'s , OR is already assumed, so they are also looking for sequences ending with | which is not correct. This : [a-zA-Z] This resolves the "OR" issue noted above, and takes care of all sequences, as they all end with a lower or upper cased letter. This ensures 100% of any escape code 'mess' is removed.

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
recursively traverse the directory structure from . down, look for string "oldstring" in all files, and replace it with "newstring", wherever found also: $ grep -rl oldstring . |xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/oldstring/newstring'

a shell function to print a ruler the width of the terminal window.

Find the package that installed a command

Quickly share code or text from vim to others.
Sprunge.us is a code/text sharing site like pastebin, but it is easy to post stuff from the command line. $ How it works: $ :w !command In vim, w writes the current tab to a file when a filename is given afterwards, but if !command is given, the output is piped to the stdin of command. $curl -F "sprunge=

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)

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.


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