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check open ports without netstat or lsof

Change the homepage of Firefox
Pros: Works in all Windows computers, most updated and compatible command. Cons: 3 liner Replace fcisolutions.com with your site name.

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.

Convert spaces in file names to underscores

Shell function to create a menu of items which may be inserted into the X paste buffer.
The function will take a comma separated list of items to be 'selected' by xsel -i: $ smenu "First item to paste,Paste me #2,Third menu item" You will then be prompted to choose one of the menu items. After you choose, you will be able to paste the string by clicking the middle mouse button. The menu will keep prompting you to choose menu items until you break out with Control-C.

Get a free shell account on a community server
Bash process substitution which curls the website 'hashbang.sh' and executes the shell script embedded in the page. This is obviously not the most secure way to run something like this, and we will scold you if you try. The smarter way would be: Download locally over SSL > curl https://hashbang.sh >> hashbang.sh Verify integrty with GPG (If available) > gpg --recv-keys 0xD2C4C74D8FAA96F5 > gpg --verify hashbang.sh Inspect source code > less hashbang.sh Run > chmod +x hashbang.sh > ./hashbang.sh

See entire packet payload using tcpdump.
This command will show you the entire payload of a packet. The final "s" increases the snaplength, grabbing the whole packet.

Show simple disk IO table using snmp
Show a simple table with disk IO for the specified host. you monitor a LOT of different thing. Mostly used for MRTG and similar, but this is nice for a quick look, which disk is busy. "public" is your SNMP community ensure that snmpd is running on the host which you intend to monitor

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"

Extract rpm package name, version and release using some fancy sed regex
This command could seem pretty pointless especially when you can get the same result more easily using the rpm builtin queryformat, like: $ rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n" | sort | column -t but nonetheless I've learned that sometimes it can be quite interesting trying to explore alternative ways to accomplish the same task (as Perl folks like to say: There's more than one way to do it!)


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