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a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
This will indent the input to be more readable. Warnings and messages are not send to STDOUT so you can just use a pipe to create the formatted outputfile, like: $ tidy -i -xml in.xml > out.xml

Check if a string is into a variable
Returns true (0) if the string is into $var, or false (1) if not.

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
Please check out my blog article on this for more detail. http://jdubb.net/blog/2009/08/07/monitor-wireshark-capture-real-time-on-remote-host-via-ssh/

List contents of jar
useful to find the list of dependencies

List files older than one year, exluding those in the .snapshot directory
Useful when you want to cron a daily deletion task in order to keep files not older than one year. The command excludes .snapshot directory to prevent backup deletion. One can append -delete to this command to delete the files : $ find /path/to/directory -not \( -name .snapshot -prune \) -type f -mtime +365 -delete

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Split and join with split and cat.
`split -b 1k file` splits files into 1k chunks. Rejoin them with `cat x* > file`.

Compute the average number of KB per file for each dir
Use this to find identify if dirs mostly contain large or small files.


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