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Show permissions of current directory and all directories upwards to /
NB not 'namei -m .', as it slices the path you give it.

Run a file system check on your next boot.
The empty file /forcefsck causes the file system check fsck to be run next time you boot up, after which it will be removed. This works too: $sudo >/forcefsck

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

What is my ip?

Go up multiple levels of directories quickly and easily.
This is a kind of wrapper around the shell builtin cd that allows a person to quickly go up several directories. Instead of typing: cd ../.. A user can type: cd ... Instead of: cd ../../.. Type: cd .... Add another period and it goes up four levels. Adding more periods will take you up more levels.

Convert spaces in file names to underscores

Rsync remote data as root using sudo
If your user has sudo on the remote box, you can rsync data as root without needing to login as root. This is very helpful if the remote box does not allow root to login over SSH (which is a common security restriction).

Generate random valid mac addresses
Shorter and more straightforward. Also in perl: $ perl -e 'print join(":", map { sprintf "%0.2X",rand(256) }(1..6))."\n"'

Securely destroy data (including whole hard disks)
GNU shred is provided by the coreutils package on most Linux distribution (meaning, you probably have it installed already), and is capable of wiping a device to DoD standards. You can give shred any file to destroy, be it your shell history or a block device file (/dev/hdX, for IDE hard drive X, for example). Shred will overwrite the target 25 times by default, but 3 is enough to prevent most recovery, and 7 passes is enough for the US Department of Defense. Use the -n flag to specify the number of passes, and man shred for even more secure erasing fun. Note that shredding your shell history may not be terribly effective on devices with journaling filesystems, RAID copies or snapshot copies, but if you're wiping a single disk, none of that is a concern. Also, it takes quite a while :)

Prepend section dates to individual entries in a summary log file
Searches for dates on lines by themselves. Uses that date to prepend all rows that contain SEARCHSTRING with the date, until it reaches another line with a date by itself. This fixed an issue with a specific log export where there would be a date, followed by all of the entries for that date.


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