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Follow the most recently updated log files
This command finds the 5 (-n5) most frequently updated logs in /var/log, and then does a multifile tail follow of those log files. Alternately, you can do this to follow a specific list of log files: sudo tail -n0 -f /var/log/{messages,secure,cron,cups/error_log}

Pretty man pages under X

clear all non-ascii chars of file.txt

Extract the emoticons regex from a running skype process
Skype has an internal regex which depicts the emoticons it supports. However you cannot simply search the binary file for it. This small 181 character line will do just that, provided skype is running. And of course, only works in linux.

Display connections histogram
Displays a connection histogram of active tcp connections. Works even better under an alias. Thanks @Areis1 for sharing this one.

Print a row of characters the width of terminal
Unlike other methods that use pipes and exec software like tr or sed or subshells, this is an extremely fast way to print a line and will always be able to detect the terminal width or else defaults to 80. It uses bash builtins for printf and echo and works with printf that supports the non-POSIX `-v` option to store result to var instead of printing to stdout. Here it is in a function that lets you change the line character to use and the length with args, it also supports color escape sequences with the echo -e option. $ function L() { local l=; builtin printf -vl "%${2:-${COLUMNS:-`tput cols 2>&-||echo 80`}}s\n" && echo -e "${l// /${1:-=}}"; } With color: $ L "`tput setaf 3`=" 1. Use printf to store n space chars followed by a newline to an environment variable "l" where n is local environment variable from $COLUMNS if set, else it will use `tput cols` and if that fails it will default to 80. 2. If printf succeeds then echo `$l` that contains the chars, replacing all blank spaces with "-" (can be changed to anything you want). From: http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash-power-prompt.html

setup a tunnel from destination machine port 80 to localhost 2001, via a second (hub) machine.
this is handy when the hubmachine is the only machine that can connect to the destination machine (allowed on ip by firewall) and you want to access it from your laptop.

watch your network load on specific network interface
-n means refresh frequency you could change eth0 to any interface you want, like wlan0

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"

Email an svn dump
Dumps a compressed svn backup to a file, and emails the files along with any messages as the body of the email


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