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Clear cassandra snapshots that are older than 30 days
Better than: $ nodetool clearsnapshot

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"

Rips CDs (Playstation, etc.) and names the files the same as the volume name

Capture video of a linux desktop

Share your terminal session (remotely or whatever)
Force the user you want to watch doing things into doing his things in a screen session. Then simply attach yourself to that session with the command shown above. Works only if you are on the same machine, of course

Remove all leading and trailing spaces or tabs from all lines of a text file
Bash only, no sed, no awk. Multiple spaces/tabs if exists INSIDE the line will be preserved. Empty lines stay intact, except they will be cleaned from spaces and tabs if any available.

Monitor system load and print out top offending processes
This checks the system load every second and if it's over a certain threshold (.8 in this example), it spits out the date, system loads and top 4 processes sorted by CPU. Additionally, the \a in the first echo creates an audible bell.

Kill all processes that listen to ports begin with 50 (50, 50x, 50xxx,...)
Run netstat as root (via sudo) to get the ID of the process listening on the desired socket. Use awk to 1) match the entry that is the listening socket, 2) matching the exact port (bounded by leading colon and end of column), 3) remove the trailing slash and process name from the last column, and finally 4) use the system(…) command to call kill to terminate the process. Two direct commands, netstat & awk, and one forked call to kill. This does kill the specific port instead of any port that starts with 50. I consider this to be safer.

list files recursively by size

Grab IP address on machine with multiple interfaces
Instead of hard-coding in a check to scrape info from ifconfig based on a specific interface, do it in a more portable way. This works really well if you switch between wired, wireless, bluetooth or even VPN connections. You can get your current IP in a script (since it'll be something like tun0 instead of eth0 or wlan1). This uses a well known public ip address 8.8.8.8, but it doesn't actually connect to it, it just shows you the route it would take.


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