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export iPad App list to txt file
This will generate the same output without changing the current directory, and filepath will be relative to the current directory. Note: it will (still) fail if your iTunes library is in a non-standard location.

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

a function to find the fastest free DNS server
Evoke from the command like as: $ timeDNS commandlinefu.com . This isn't too terribly practical, but it is a good code example of using subshells to run the queries in parallel and the use of an "anonymous function" (a/k/a "inline group") to group i/o. . I'm assuming you have already defined your local DNS cache as ${local_DNS}, (here, it's 192.168.0.1). . You do need to install `moreutils` to get `sponge`. . If you're willing to wait, a slower version w/o sponge, (and w/o sorting), is this: . DNS () { for x in "192.168.0.1" "208.67.222.222" "208.67.220.220" "198.153.192.1" "198.153.194.1" "156.154.70.1" "156.154.71.1" "8.8.8.8" "8.8.4.4"; do (echo -n "$x "; dig @"$x" "$*"|grep Query) ; done ; }

Diff 2 file struct - Useful for branch diff and jars diff(uncompressed)
This is usefull to diff 2 paths in branches of software, or in different versions of a same zip file. So you can get the real file diff.

Single use vnc-over-ssh connection
This command 1. SSH into a machine 2. Tunnels VNC port to your local computer ("-L 5900:localhost:5900") 3. Runs a single use vnc server ("x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0") 4. Goes into the background ("-f") 5. Runs VNC viewer on the local computer connecting to the remote machine via the newly created SSH tunnel ("vinagre localhost:5900")

Block all FaceBook traffic

To find the LDAP clients connected to LDAP service running on Solaris

How to run X without any graphics hardware
This starts an X server using Xvfb(1) (no graphics hardware required), then starts a VNC server on the display. Change :1 if there's a conflict with an existing display, and change 800x600x24 to suit your tastes (24 is the bit depth, 800x600 is the size). This command obviously requires X be installed, and also x11vnc(1); both are available via your favourite package manager. You can also use another VNC server of your choosing, as long as DISPLAY is set to the display of Xvfb(1). To change your desktop environment (the default is twm(1), which is rather fail), you can add it to your ~/.xinitrc file (see the startx(1) manpage for details).

Content search.
Grep will read the contents of each file in PWD and will use the REs $1 $2 ... $n to match the contents. In case of match, grep will print the appropriate file, line number and the matching line. It's just easier to write $ ff word1 word2 word3 Instead of $ grep -rinE 'word1|word2|word3' .

Pass TAB as field separator to sort, join, cut, etc.
Use this BASH trick to create a variable containing the TAB character and pass it as the argument to sort, join, cut and other commands which don't understand the \t notation. $ sort -t $'\t' ... $ join -t $'\t' ... $ cut -d $'\t' ...


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