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Redirect STDIN
Several times, I find myself hitting my up arrow, and changing the search term. Unfortunately, I find myself wasting too much time typing: $ grep kernel /var/log/messages Redirecting STDIN allows me to put the search term at the end so I less cursor movement to change what I'm searching for: $ < /var/log/messages grep kernel If you're using the emacs keyboard binding, then after you press your up arrow, press CTRL+w to erase the word. If this has already been submitted, I couldn't find it with the search utility.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Unbelievable Shell Colors, Shading, Backgrounds, Effects for Non-X
I've been using linux for almost a decade and only recently discovered that most terminals like putty, xterm, xfree86, vt100, etc., support hundreds of shades of colors, backgrounds and text/terminal effects. This simply prints out a ton of them, the output is pretty amazing. If you use non-x terminals all the time like I do, it can really be helpful to know how to tweak colors and terminal capabilities. Like: $ echo $'\33[H\33[2J'

Create a QR code image in MECARD format
Add the QR code image on your webpage, business card ., etc, so people can scan it and quick add to their Contact Address Book. Tested on iPhone with QRreader.

calculate in commandline with bash
Only works for integer arithmetic.

Find files and list them sorted by modification time
This uses the ability of find (at least the one from GNU findutils that is shiped with most linux distros) to display change time as part of its output. No xargs needed.

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"

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

shush MOTD
I'm annoyed by the boilerplate "don't login unless you are supposed messages in our environment" - this shuts them up.

Display information sent by browser
Have netcat listen on port 8000, point browser to http://localhost:8000/ and you see the information sent. netcat terminates as soon as your browser disconnects. I tested this command on my Fedora box but linuxrawkstar pointed out that he needs to use $ nc -l -p 8000 instead. This depends on the netcat version you use. The additional '-p' is required by GNU netcat that for example is used by Debian but not by the OpenBSD netcat port used by my Fedora system.


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