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pimp text output e.g. "Linux rocks!" to look nice

Basic sed usage with xargs to refactor a node.js depdendency

get the oldest file in a directory
reverse the sorting of ls to get the newest file: $ls -1tr --group-directories-first /path/to/dir/ | tail -n 1 Problems: If there are no files in the directory you will get a directory or nothing.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

List bash functions defined in .bash_profile or .bashrc
typeset command gives to stdout all the functions defined in a bash session, -f and -F switches are for: all functions names with body (-f) and all functions names only (-F).

Get MX records for a domain

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Mount a VMware virtual disk (.vmdk) file on a Linux box
Assumes XP/2000/2003. For Server 2008+ try offset=105,906,176 You can find this number in the System Information utility under Partition Starting Offset. UEFI based boxes you want partition 2 since the first is just the boot files (and FAT). This works with (storage side) snapshots which is handy for single file restores on NFS mounted VMware systems

Cleanly manage tempfiles in scripts
Cleanly create tempfiles using mktemp and remove them using traps instead of removing them in the end of the script. This way, you make sure the tempfiles are removed properly even if the script is killed or interrupted. For a user script in KDE4, you can set TMPROOT using : $ TMPROOT=$(kde4-config --path tmp)

export iPad App list to txt file
This will generate the same output without changing the current directory, and filepath will be relative to the current directory. Note: it will (still) fail if your iTunes library is in a non-standard location.


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