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Search inside a folder of jar/zip files
Great for finding which jar some pesky class is hiding in!

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.

kde4 lock screen command
If you wish to launch the kde4 screen saver without the password prompt to exit, use this command: $ qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.SetActive True Also can be done with: $ /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/kscreenlocker --forcelock

Hold off any screensavers/timeouts
Moves the mouse 1 pixel down and to the right, then immediately back again, every 4 minutes. This keeps screensavers from turning on. I have used this extensively and I've never even noticed the mouse movement because it is so subtle.

Check if the Debian package was used since its installation/upgrade.
This script compares the modification date of /var/lib/dpkg/info/${package}.list and all the files mentioned there. It could be wrong on noatime partitions. Here is non-oneliner: #!/bin/sh package=$1; list=/var/lib/dpkg/info/${package}.list; inst=$(stat "$list" -c %X); cat $list | ( while read file; do if [ -f "$file" ]; then acc=$(stat "$file" -c %X); if [ $inst -lt $acc ]; then echo used $file exit 0 fi; fi; done exit 1 )

Create md5sum of files under the current dir excluding some directories
Useful if you want get all the md5sum of files but you want exclude some directories. If your list of files is short you can make in one command as follow: $ find . -type d \( -name DIR1 -o -name DIR2 \) -prune -o -type f -exec md5sum {} \; Alternatively you can specify a different command to be executed on the resulting files.

Generate pretty secure random passwords
These are my favourite switches on pwgen: -B Don't include ambiguous characters in the password -n Include at least one number in the password -y Include at least one special symbol in the password -c Include at least one capital letter in the password It just works! Add a number to set password length, add another to set how many password to output. Example: pwgen -Bnyc 12 20 this will output 20 password of 12 chars length.

silent/shh - shorthand to make commands really quiet
Sometimes I just want to run a command quietly but all that keyboard shifting makes my fingers hurt. This little function does the job eg.: $ if shh type less; then PAGER=less; fi

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"

Escape forward slashes in a variable
For example $ path="/etc/apt/sources.list"; echo ${path//'/'/'\/'} will print $ \/etc\/apt\/sources.list


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