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Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

df without line wrap on long FS name

ping as traceroute
This command uses ping to get the routers' IP addresses to the destination host as traceroute does. If you know what I mean..

a for loop with filling 0 format, with seq
seq allows you to format the output thanks to the -f option. This is very useful if you want to rename your files to the same format in order to be able to easily sort for example: $for i in `seq 1 3 10`; do touch foo$i ;done And $ls foo* | sort -n foo1 foo10 foo4 foo7 But: $for i in `seq -f %02g 1 3 10`; do touch foo$i ;done So $ls foo* | sort -n foo01 foo04 foo07 foo10

Opens files containing search term in vim with search term highlighted
Takes the same arguments that ack does. E.g. ack-open -i "searchterm" opens all files below the current directory containing the search term. The search term is also highlighted within vim if you have hlsearch set. Works on zsh, unsure if it works on bash. Note: ubuntu users have to change ack to ack-grep unless you already have it aliased (as I do)

In place line numbering
Add permanent line numbers to a file without creating a temp file. The rm command deletes file10 while the nl command works on the open file descriptor of file10 which it outputs into a new file again named file10. The new file10 will now be numbered in the same directory with the same file name and content as before, but it will in fact be a new file, using (ls -i) to show its inode number will prove this.

Insert the last command without the last argument (bash)
$/usr/sbin/ab2 -f TLS1 -S -n 1000 -c 100 -t 2 http://www.google.com/ then $!:- http://www.commandlinefu.com/ is the same as $/usr/sbin/ab2 -f TLS1 -S -n 1000 -c 100 -t 2 http://www.commandlinefu.com/

Terminal redirection
can display the commands and their output to another user who is connected to another terminal, by example pts/3

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"

copy partition table from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb


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