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Run a command that has been aliased without the alias
Most distributions alias cp to 'cp -i', which means when you attempt to copy into a directory that already contains the file, cp will prompt to overwrite. A great default to have, but when you mean to overwrite thousands of files, you don't want to sit there hitting [y] then [enter] thousands of times. Enter the backslash. It runs the command unaliased, so as in the example, cp will happily overwrite existing files much in the way mv works.

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

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"

most used unix commands

create a backup for all directories from current dir
Create backup (.tar.gz) for all first-level directory from current dir.

get the ascii number with bash builtin printf

complete extraction of a debian-package
extracts the debian-package $debfile to $extractdir, including all packaging-information. to repack the package, just type: $dpkg-deb -b $extractdir

Quickly analyse an Apache error log
This searches the Apache error_log for each of the 5 most significant Apache error levels, if any are found the date is then cut from the output in order to sort then print the most common occurrence of each error.

Waste time for about 3 minutes
If you're a slow reader and/or you like to ponder, adjust the sleep time to be longer

Open Remote Desktop (RDP) from command line and connect local resources
The above command will open a Remote Desktop connection from command line, authenticate using default username and password (great for virtual machines; in the exampe above it's administrator:password), create a shared folder between your machine and the other machine and configure resolution to best fit your desktop (I don't like full screen because it make the desktop panels to disappear). The command will run in the background, and expect to receive parameters. You should enter hostname or IP address as a parameter to the command, and can also override the defaults parameters with your own.


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