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Search and replace text in all php files with ruby
Search for the string "search" and replace it with the string "replace", on all files with the extension php in the curret folder. Do also a backup of each file with the extension "bkp".

Quick case-insenstive partial filename search
This is a simple command, but extremely useful. It's a quick way to search the file names in the current directory for a substring. Normally people use "ls *term*" but that requires the stars and is not case insensitive. Color (for both ls and grep) is an added bonus.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Get a MySQL DB dump from a remote machine
This command will dump a database on a remote stream to stdout, compress it, stream it to your local machine, decompress it and put it into a file called database.sql.You could even pipe it into mysql on your local machine to restore it immediately. I had to use this recently because the server I needed a backup from didn't have enough disk space.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Get IP from host
I just wanted a simple DNS request. Because host and nslookup commands are not on all systems, we use getent instead. Thanks aulem for that tip.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Show errors in the kernel ring buffer
Much more useful then parsing syslog

Progress bar for MySQL import
Print out the progress of MySQL import using the pv command. Updates every second.

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit
Audio acknowledgement for host availability. When running the command from a Linux systems, you can use "festival" or "espeak" instead of "say".


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