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using scanner device from command line
you have to replace "mustek_usb" with the scanner found by `scanimage -l`

Get your outgoing IP address
Get your external ip adress thanks to http://www.icanhazip.com

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"

Fast command-line directory browsing
After typing cd directory [enter] ls [enter] so many times, I figured I'd try to make it into a function. I was surprised how smoothly I was able to integrate it into my work on the command line. Just use cdls as you would cd. It will automatically list the directory contents after you cd into the directory. To make the command always available, add it to your .bashrc file. Not quite monumental, but still pretty convenient.

Recursively chmod all dirs to 755 and all files to 644

Display information sent by browser
Have netcat listen on port 8000, point browser to http://localhost:8000/ and you see the information sent. netcat terminates as soon as your browser disconnects. I tested this command on my Fedora box but linuxrawkstar pointed out that he needs to use $ nc -l -p 8000 instead. This depends on the netcat version you use. The additional '-p' is required by GNU netcat that for example is used by Debian but not by the OpenBSD netcat port used by my Fedora system.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Watch YouTube and other Flash videos via mplayer (or whatever)
Many sites with Flash video players will download video files to /tmp on Linux, with temporary filenames like "FlashbGTHm4". These will often play in mplayer, totem, or other movie playing software. You must first navigate to a video page, let it start loading, and then pause playback.

Remove empty directories
It only works in zsh

Record output of any command using 'tee' at backend; mainly can be used to capture the output of ssh from client side while connecting to a server.
Optionally, you can create a new function to do this with a custom command. Edit $HOME/.bashrc and add: myssh () { ssh $1 | tee sshlog ; } Save it. At command prompt: $ myssh user@server


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