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copy root to new device
Clone a root partition. The reason for double-mounting the root device is to avoid any filesystem overlay issues. This is particularly important for /dev. Also, note the importance of the trailing slashes on the paths when using rsync (search the man page for "slash" for more details). rsync and bash add several subtle nuances to path handling; using trailing slashes will effectively mean "clone this directory", even when run multiple times. For example: run once to get an initial copy, and then run again in single user mode just before rebooting into the new disk. Using file globs (which miss dot-files) or leaving off the trailing slash with rsync (which will create /mnt/target/root) are traps that are easy to fall into.

Find and remove core files

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Print Asterisk phone logs
Prints a log of phonecalls placed from/to an asterisk server, formated into an easily readable table. You can use partial number/queue matches, or use .* to match everything.

ensure your ssh tunnel will always be up (add in crontab)
I find it ugly & sexy at the same time isn't it ?

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Remove ( color / special / escape / ANSI ) codes, from text, with sed
Remove ( color / special / escape / ANSI ) codes, from text, with sed Credit to the original folks who I've copied this command from. The diff here is: Theirs: [m|K] Theirs is supposed to remove \E[NUMBERS;NUMBERS[m OR K] This statement is incorrect in 2 ways. 1. The letters m and K are two of more than 20+ possible letters that can end these sequences. 2. Inside []'s , OR is already assumed, so they are also looking for sequences ending with | which is not correct. This : [a-zA-Z] This resolves the "OR" issue noted above, and takes care of all sequences, as they all end with a lower or upper cased letter. This ensures 100% of any escape code 'mess' is removed.

List open files that have no links to them on the filesystem
I have come across a situation in the past where someone has unlinked a file by running an 'rm' command against it while it was still being written to by a running process. The problem manifested itself when a 'df' command showed a filesystem at 100%, but this did not match the total value of a 'du -sk *'. When this happens, the process continues to write to the file but you can no longer see the file on the filesystem. Stopping and starting the process will, more often than not, get rid of the unlinked file, however this is not always possible on a live server. When you are in this situation you can use the 'lsof' command above to get the PID of the process that owns the file (in the sample output this is 23521). Run the following command to see a sym-link to the file (marked as deleted): $ cd /proc/23521/fd && ls -l Truncate the sym-link to regain your disk space: $ > /proc/23521/fd/3 I should point out that this is pretty brutal and *could* potentially destabilise your system depending on what process the file belongs to that you are truncating.

In-Place search/replace with datestamped backup
Does an in situ search-replace but leaves a datestamped backup. A variation with more precision: sed -i.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S 's/pattern/replace' [filename]

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"


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