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Check if a remote port is up using dnstools.com (i.e. from behind a firewall/proxy)
Shell function; returns 0 if the port is up, 1 otherwise (check $? after executing). First parameter: IP address/hostname Second parameter: port number There is no error checking for the input parameters.

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" }

Make sudo forget password instantly
By default sudo 'remembers' password for a few minutes, so that you do not need to re-enter password for a series of sudo commands that might follow within a short time duration. However, sometime you might want sudo to instantly 'forget' the password. (Next sudo command will need you to reenter the password) Credit: I first learned this while listening to one of the 'tuxradar' podcast.

Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)
as per eightmillion's comment. Simply economical :)

Rename files in batch

grep across a git repo and open matching files in gedit

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Fix Ubuntu's Broken Sound Server
Ever since the switch to pulseaudio, Ubuntu users including myself have found themselves with no sound intermittently. To fix this, just use this command and restarts firefox or mplayer or whatever.

summarize a list of IP addresses, verifying IP address and giving counts for each IP found
Working with lists of IP addresses it is sometimes useful to summarize a count of how many times an IP address appears in the file. This example, summarizeIP, uses another function "verifyIP" previously defined in commandlinefu.com to ensure only valid IP addresses get counted. The summary list is presented in count order starting with highest count.

Simple complete system backup excluding files or directories
You can exclude more system folders or individual files which are not necessary for the backup and can be recreated after the restore procedure, like /lost+found, /mnt, /media, /tmp, /usr ... Restoring the above backup procedure is as simple as becoming root and typing: $ tar zxpf backup.tgz -C / You can extract any file or directory out of the backup.tgz file for recovery, for instance, if you have a corrupt or mis-configured fstab file, you could simply issue the command: $ tar zxpf backup.tgz /ect/fstab -C / Other options: v add verbose option to see files processed A far safer solution is to restore the desired files under a different directory, and then compare, move, or update the files to their original locations afterward.


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