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Send an email from the terminal when job finishes
Sends an email from the terminal.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Shutdown a Windows machine from Linux
This will issue a shutdown command to the Windows machine. username must be an administrator on the Windows machine. Requires samba-common package installed. Other relevant commands are: net rpc shutdown -r : reboot the Windows machine net rpc abortshutdown : abort shutdown of the Windows machine Type: net rpc to show all relevant commands

See a full last history by expanding logrotated wtmp files
When your wtmp files are being logrotated, here's an easy way to unpack them all on the fly to see more than a week in the past. The rm is the primitive way to prevent symlink prediction attack.

dump the whole database

most used unix commands

Create backup copy of file, adding suffix of the date of the file modification (NOT today's date)

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)

Display the standard deviation of a column of numbers with awk

Create a bunch of dummy text files
Using the 'time' command, running this with 'tr' took 28 seconds (and change) each time but using base64 only took 8 seconds (and change). If the file doesn't have to be viewable, pulling straight from urandom with head only took 6 seconds (and change)


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