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Launch firefox on a remote linux server
Actually 'firefox' is a script that then launches the 'firefox-bin' executable. You need to specify the 'no-remote' option in order to launch remote firefox instead of your local one (this drove me crazy time ago)

get all Google ipv4 subnets for a iptables firewall for example
a bit shorter, parenthesis not needed but added for clarity

Add .gitignore files to all empty directories recursively from your current directory

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

locate a filename, make sure it exists and display it with full details
use the locate command to find files on the system and verify they exist (-e) then display each one in full details.

RTFM function
Simple edit to work for OSX. Now just add this to your ~/.profile and `source ~/.profile`

extracting audio and video from a movie
rips the audio and video stream of a movie. The two streams are stored separately.

Rename files in batch

Output the content of your Active Directory in a CSV file

Use socat to emulate an SMTP mail SERVER
Lots of scripts show you how to use socat to send an email to an SMTP server; this command actually emulates an SMTP server! It assumes the client is only sending to one recipient, and it's not at all smart, but it'll capture the email into a log file and the client will stop retrying. I used this to diagnose what emails were being sent by cron and subsequently discarded, but you can use it for all sorts of things.


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