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add all files not under version control to repository
This should handle whitespaces well and will not get confused if your filenames have "?" in them

search installed files of package, that doesn't remember his name well. On rpm systems
rpm, sometimes, is not wildcard friendly. To search files installed from package this could be useful. change PACKAGENAME to any package do you want to search

Sharing file through http 80 port
From the other machine open a web navigator and go to ip from the machine who launch netcat, http://ip-address/ If you have some web server listening at 80 port then you would need stop them or select another port before launch net cat ;-) * You need netcat tool installed

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"

Convert a file from ISO-8859-1 (or whatever) to UTF-8 (or whatever)
I use it sometimes when I work on a french file transferred from a windows XP to a Debian-UTF8 system. Those are not correctly displayed: ? ? ? and so on $man tcs # for all charsets

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Joker wants an email if the Brand X server is down. Set a cron job for every 5 mins with this line and he gets an email when/if a ping takes longer than 3 seconds.

Run TOP in Color, split 4 ways for x seconds - the ultimate ps command. Great for init scripts
One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000! $ G=$(stty -g);stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2));top -n1; stty $G;unset G Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well. # save the correct settings to G var. $ G=$(stty -g) # change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise $ stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2)) # run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least) $ top -n1 # reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself $ stty $G;unset G This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this! Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ] Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed

Redefine the cd command's behavior
Often, the very next command after the cd command is 'ls', so why not combine them?. Tested on a Red Hat derivative and Mac OS X Leopard Update: changed ${1:-$HOME} to "${@:-$HOME}" to accomodate directories with spaces in the names

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Rsync two directories with filtered extensions


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