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Simplest port scanner
Very handy way to perform a host scan if you don't have nmap,ncat,nc ...or other tools installed locally. When executing a command on a /dev/tcp/$host/$port pseudo-device file, Bash opens a TCP connection to the associated socket and UDP connection when using /dev/udp/$host/$port.A simlpe way to get servers banner is to run this command "cat < /dev/tcp/localhost/25" , here you will get mail server's banner. NOTE: Bash, as packaged for Debian, does not support using the /dev/tcp and /dev/udp pseudo-device it's not enabled by default Because bash in Debian is compiled with ?disable-net-redirections.

Quickly (soft-)reboot skipping hardware checks
If you are doing some tests which require reboots (e. g. startup skripts, kernel module parameters, ...), this is very time intensive, if you have got a hardware with a long pre-boot phase due to hardware checks. At this time, kexec can help, which only restarts the kernel with all related stuff. First the kernel to be started is loaded, then kexec -e jumps up to start it. Is as hard as a reboot -f, but several times faster (e. g. 1 Minute instead of 12 on some servers here).

Alias for getting OpenPGP keys for Launchpad PPAs on Ubuntu
Makes it easy to add keys to new ppa sources entries in apt sources.list Now to add the key for the chromium-daily ppa: $ launchpadkey 4E5E17B5

Remove newlines from output
Remove newlines from output. One character shorter than awk /./ filename and doesn't use a superfluous cat. To be fair though, I'm pretty sure fraktil was thinking being able to nuke newlines from any command is much more useful than just from one file.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

shell equivalent of a boss button
Nobody wants the boss to notice when you're slacking off. This will fill your shell with random data, parts of it highlighted. Note that 'highlight' is the Perl module App::highlight, not "a universal sourcecode to formatted text converter." You'll also need Term::ANSIColor.

Convert a bunch of HTML files from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 file encoding in a folder and all sub-folders
This is my first attempt at converting all HTML files to UTF-8 file encoding, including all subfolders. Theres probably a much more compact way to do it, but I'm quite proud of it with my windows background ;)

Summary of disk usage, excluding other filesystems, summarised and sorted by size
This command is useful for finding out which directories below the current location use the most space. It is summarised by directory and excludes mounted filesystems. Finally it is sorted by size.

Find the package that installed a command

intercept stdout/stderr of another process
similar to the previous command, but with more friendly output (tested on linux)


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