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Get IP address from domain
I'm not sure how reliable this command is, but it works for my needs. Here's also a variant using grep. nslookup www.example.com | grep "^Address: " | awk '{print $2}'

copy timestamps of files from one location to another - useful when file contents are already synced but timestamps are wrong.
Sometimes when copying files from one place to another, the timestamps get lost. Maybe you forgot to add a flag to preserve timestamps in your copy command. You're sure the files are exactly the same in both locations, but the timestamps of the files in the new home are wrong and you need them to match the source. Using this command, you will get a shell script (/tmp/retime.sh) than you can move to the new location and just execute - it will change the timestamps on all the files and directories to their previous values. Make sure you're in the right directory when you launch it, otherwise all the touch commands will create new zero-length files with those names. Since find's output includes "." it will also change the timestamp of the current directory. Ideally rsync would be the way to handle this - since it only sends changes by default, there would be relatively little network traffic resulting. But rsync has to read the entire file contents on both sides to be sure no bytes have changed, potentially causing a huge amount of local disk I/O on each side. This could be a problem if your files are large. My approach avoids all the comparison I/O. I've seen comments that rsync with the "--size-only" and "--times" options should do this also, but it didn't seem to do what I wanted in my test. With my approach you can review/edit the output commands before running them, so you can tell exactly what will happen. The "tee" command both displays the output on the screen for your review, AND saves it to the file /tmp/retime.sh. Credit: got this idea from Stone's answer at http://serverfault.com/questions/344731/rsync-copying-over-timestamps-only?rq=1, and combined it into one line.

Tell Analytics to fuck itself.
See http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html if you are unclear about the Google Analytics cookie system. If Firefox is your daily browser, be a good Orwellian and run this command regularly. If you see, 'SQL error near line 1: database is locked', close Firefox and run again.

Eavesdrop on your system
This command takes a snapshot of the open files for a PID 1234 then waits 10 seconds and takes another snapshot of the same PID, it then displays the difference between each snapshot to give you an insight into what the application is doing.

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Temporarily ignore known SSH hosts
you may create an alias also, which I did ;-) alias sshu="ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null "

Convert a bunch of HTML files from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 file encoding in a folder and all sub-folders
This is my first attempt at converting all HTML files to UTF-8 file encoding, including all subfolders. Theres probably a much more compact way to do it, but I'm quite proud of it with my windows background ;)

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" }

most used unix commands

A command to copy mysql tables from a remote host to current host via ssh.
This version compresses the data for transport.


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