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List PCI device with class and vendor/device IDs
This is a quick replacement for lspci if you need to know what's in a given system but pciutils is not installed. You then need something that can look up the IDs from pci.ids if you want the verbose output.

Prepare B&W scans for clean looking, searchable PDF
Scan pages in, clean them up in an image editor, save to individual files. Use this command to convert each page to PDF. Combine in Acrobat Professional, and use the built-in OCR with the "Searchable Image (Exact)" option. Gives excellent image quality and file size (avoids awful JPEG image recompression that Acrobat and other OCR systems tend to do.)

check remote port without telnet

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 seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

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"

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

The simplest way to transport information over a network
Einstein's razor: As simple as possible, but not simpler. On the destination machine netcat listens on any port (1234 in the example) and sends anything it receives into a file or pipe. On the source machine a separate netcat takes input from a file or pipe and sends it over the network to the listener. This is great between machines on a LAN where you don't care about authentication, encryption, or compression and I would recommend it for being simpler than anything else in this situation. Over the internet you should use something with better security.

Backup VPS disk to another host


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