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Securely destroy data (including whole hard disks)
GNU shred is provided by the coreutils package on most Linux distribution (meaning, you probably have it installed already), and is capable of wiping a device to DoD standards. You can give shred any file to destroy, be it your shell history or a block device file (/dev/hdX, for IDE hard drive X, for example). Shred will overwrite the target 25 times by default, but 3 is enough to prevent most recovery, and 7 passes is enough for the US Department of Defense. Use the -n flag to specify the number of passes, and man shred for even more secure erasing fun. Note that shredding your shell history may not be terribly effective on devices with journaling filesystems, RAID copies or snapshot copies, but if you're wiping a single disk, none of that is a concern. Also, it takes quite a while :)

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"

Convert file type to unix utf-8
converts encoding of a file to unix utf-8 useful for data files that contain what would be usable ascii text but are encoded as mpeg or some other encoding that prevents you from doing common manipulations like 'sed'

Retrieve "last modified" timestamp of web resource in UTC seconds
This command line assumes that "${url}" is the URL of the web resource. It can be useful to check the "freshness" of a download URL before a GET request.

cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"

Remove all unused kernels with apt-get
This will remove all installed kernels on your debian based install, except the one you're currently using. From: http://tuxtweaks.com/2009/12/remove-old-kernels-in-ubuntu/comment-page-1/#comment-1590

Clear terminal Screen

Display unique values of a column
Find the unique values of a column utilizing awk. Credits goes to here (posted by "era"): http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/77138-awk-print-distinct-col-values.html

Go up multiple levels of directories quickly and easily.
This is a kind of wrapper around the shell builtin cd that allows a person to quickly go up several directories. Instead of typing: cd ../.. A user can type: cd ... Instead of: cd ../../.. Type: cd .... Add another period and it goes up four levels. Adding more periods will take you up more levels.


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