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Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Use all the cores or CPUs when compiling
Force make command to create as many compile processes as specified (4 in the example), so that each one goes into one core or CPU and compilation happens in parallel. This reduces the time required to compile a program by up to a half in the case of CPUs with 2 cores, one fourth in the case of quad cores... and so on.

Monitor a file with tail with timestamps added

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Search for a string in all files recursively

extract email addresses from some file (or any other pattern)

Grep syslog today last hour
Uses date to grep de logfile for today and uses it to get the last hour logs. Can be used to get last minute logs or today's logs.

Simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data
Sometimes you need a simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data. Example: Consider you want to know, which data is posted by a homepage to a remote script without analysing the html code! A simple way to do this is to save the page to your computer, substitude all action="address" with action="localhost:portnumber", run 'ncat -l portnumber' and open the edited page with your browser. If you then submit the form, ncat will print out the http-protocol with all the posted data.

vmstat/iostat with timestamp
Also useful with iostat, or pretty much anything else you want timestamped.


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