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diff files while disregarding indentation and trailing white space
**NOTE** Tekhne's alternative is much more succinct and its output conforms to the files actual contents rather than with white space removed My command on the other hand uses bash process substitution (and "Minimal" Perl), instead of files, to first remove leading and trailing white space from lines, before diff'ing the streams. Very useful when differences in indentation, such as in programming source code files, may be irrelevant

Print all 256 colors for testing TERM or for a quick reference
This is super fast and an easy way to test your terminal for 256 color support. Unlike alot of info about changing colors in the terminal, this uses the ncurses termcap/terminfo database to determine the escape codes used to generate the colors for a specific TERM. That means you can switch your terminal and then run this to check the real output. $ tset xterm-256color at any rate that is some super lean code! Here it is in function form to stick in your .bash_profile aa_256 () { ( x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))s`; for i in {0..256}; do o=00$i; echo -e ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${y// /=}$x; done ) } From my bash_profile: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

See system users

Convert a flv video file to avi using mencoder

grep for tabs without using Ctrl-V trick
-P tells grep to use perl regex matches (only works on the GNU grep as far as I know.)

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Get absolut path to your bash-script

View and review the system process tree.
The "pstree" command uses special line-drawing characters. However, when piped into the "less" pager, these are normally disabled.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Superfast portscanner


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