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Shows all packages installed that are recommended by other packages
Shows the packages installed on your system that are recomemnded by other packages. You should remove these packages.

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Disconnect telnet
You are stuck with testing a tcp port using telnet, and must kill the telnet session from another terminal... Or, press ctrl+5 and write close/quit to force the current connection to close..

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).

Swap the two last arguments of the current command line
Say you just typed a long command like this: $ rsync -navupogz --delete /long/path/to/dir_a /very/long/path/to/dir_b but you really want to sync dir_b to dir_a. Instead of rewriting all the command line, just type followed by , and your command line will read $ rsync -navupogz --delete /very/long/path/to/dir_b /long/path/to/dir_a

dump a single table of a database to file

Take a screenshot of the window the user clicks on and name the file the same as the window title
In general, this is actually not better than the "scrot -d4" command I'm listing it as an alternative to, so please don't vote it down for that. I'm adding this command because xwd (X window dumper) comes with X11, so it is already installed on your machine, whereas scrot probably is not. I've found xwd handy on boxen that I don't want to (or am not allowed to) install packages on. NOTE: The dd junk for renaming the file is completely optional. I just did that for fun and because it's interesting that xwd embeds the window title in its metadata. I probably should have just parsed the output from file(1) instead of cutting it out with dd(1), but this was more fun and less error prone. NOTE2: Many programs don't know what to do with an xwd format image file. You can convert it to something normal using NetPBM's xwdtopnm(1) or ImageMagick's convert(1). For example, this would work: "xwd | convert fd:0 foo.jpg". Of course, if you have ImageMagick already installed, you'd probably use import(1) instead of xwd. NOTE3: Xwd files can be viewed using the X Window UnDumper: "xwud <foo.xwd". ImageMagick and The GIMP can also read .xwd files. Strangely, eog(1) cannot. NOTE4: The sleep is not strictly necessary, I put it in there so that one has time to raise the window above any others before clicking on it.

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Generate a Random MAC address
Use the following variation for FreeBSD: $ openssl rand 6 | xxd -p | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/:$//'

Test load balancers
With the "--resolve" switch, you can avoid doing DNS lookups or edit the /etc/hosts file, by providing the IP address for a domain directly. Useful if you have many servers with different IP addresses behind a load balancer. Of course, you would loop it: $ for IP in 10.11.0.{1..10}; do curl --resolve subdomain.example.com:80:$IP subdomain.example.com -I -s; done


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