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Generate diff of first 500 lines of two files
Useful for massive files where doing a full diff would take too long. This just runs diff on the first 500 lines of each. The use of subshells to feed STDIN is quite a useful construct.

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"

Set gnome wallpaper to a random jpg from the specified directory
Every time this is run it will change your background picture. For added fun Add some DBUS magic: . $HOME/.dbus/session-bus/`cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id`-0 export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and a crontab entry: */5 * * * * above_command_in_script.sh >/dev/null 2>/dev/null now wallpaper changes every 5 mins

Find the package that installed a command

Find the package that installed a command

find all active IP addresses in a network
There are several other options. This one is plain and simple. Another option is: nmap -sP 192.168.0.0/24

Rescan partitions on a SCSI device
Used this after cloning a disk with dd to make the newly written partitions show up in /dev/

search google on os x
Searches Google, but requires no "", and will also search all terms input in the CL, eg: > google foo bar returns search URL "http://www.google.com/search?q=foo%20bar" You could also use awk to replace all spaces with a +, which is how the Google search handles spaces, but that makes it more than one line.

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"

Check which files are opened by Firefox then sort by largest size.
Just refining last proposal for this check, showing awk power to make more complex math (instead /1024/1024, 2^20). We don't need declare variable before run lsof, because $(command) returns his output. Also, awk can perform filtering by regexp instead to call grep. I changed the 0.0000xxxx messy output, with a more readable form purging all fractional numbers and files less than 1 MB.


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