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Sync the existing directory structure to destination, without transferring any files

ssh to machine behind shared NAT
Useful to get network access to a machine behind shared IP NAT. Assumes you have an accessible jump host and physical console or drac/ilo/lom etc access to run the command. Run the command on the host behind NAT then ssh connect to your jump host on port 2222. That connection to the jump host will be forwarded to the hidden machine. Note: Some older versions of ssh do not acknowledge the bind address (0.0.0.0 in the example) and will only listen on the loopback address.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example: $ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Gathering all MAC's in your local network
replace eth0 with your ethernet or wireless network interface.

Say something out loud
Whatever arguments you pass will be spoken out loud. (Put it in a script or shell function.)

Merges given files line by line
In the above example all files have 4 lines. In "file1" consecutive lines are: "num, 1, 2, 3", in "file2": "name, Jack, Jim, Frank" and in "file3": "scores, 1300, 1100, 980". This one liner can save considerate ammount of time when you're trying to process serious portions of data. "-d" option allows one to set series of characters to be used as separators between data originating from given files.

List all active access_logs for currently running Apache or Lighttpd process
Ever logged into a *nix box and needed to know which webserver is running and where all the current access_log files are? Run this one liner to find out. Works for Apache or Lighttpd as long as CustomLog name is somewhat standard. HINT: works great as input into for loop, like this: $ for i in `lsof -p $(netstat -ltpn|awk '$4 ~ /:80$/ {print substr($7,1,index($7,"/")-1)}')| awk '$9 ~ /access.log$/ {print $9| "sort -u"}'` ; do echo $i; done Very useful for triage on unfamiliar servers!

Emulating netcat -e (netcat-traditional or netcat-openbsd) with the gnu-netcat
Then just nc servername 2600 and ./script.sh kill the client with ctrl+c. You can reconnect several times. kill the server with exit

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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