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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"

Change MySQL Pager For Nicer Output

Function to create an alias on the fly
Is used like this: mkalias rmcache "rm -rfv app/cache/*"

Google dictionary of word definitions
$ wget -qO - "http://www.google.com/dictionary/json?callback=dict_api.callbacks.id100&q=steering+wheel&sl=en&tl=en&restrict=pr,de&client=te" this does the actual google dictionary query, returns a JSON string encapsulated in some fancy tag $ sed 's/dict_api\.callbacks.id100.//' here we remove the tag beginning $ sed 's/,200,null)//' and here the tag end There are also some special characters which could cause problems with some JSON parsers, so if you get some errors, this is probably the case (sed is your friend). I laso like to trim the "webDefinitions" part, because it (sometimes) contains misleading information. $ sed 's/\,\"webDefinitions.*//' (but remember to append a "}" at the end, because the JSON string will be invalid) The output also contains links to mp3 files with pronounciation. As of now, this is only usable in the English language. If you choose other than English, you will only get webDefinitions (which are crap).

32 bits or 64 bits?
Easy and direct way to find this out.

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"

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

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

Debug SSH at the Maximum Verbosity Level
When debugging an ssh connection either to optimize your settings ie compression, ciphers, or more commonly for debugging an issue connecting, this alias comes in real handy as it's not easy to remember the '-o LogLevel=DEBUG3' argument, which adds a boost of debugging info not available with -vvv alone. Especially useful are the FD info, and the setup negotiation to create a cleaner, faster connection.

Quick and dirty RSS
runs an rss feed through sed replacing the closing tags with newlines and the opening tags with white space making it readable.


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