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Put terminal into vi mode
For if you want to use vi key bindings in the terminal

sort the output of the 'du' command by largest first, using human readable output.
In this case I'm just grabbing the next level of subdirectories (and same level regular files) with the --max-depth=1 flag. leaving out that flag will just give you finer resolution. Note that you have to use the -h switch with both 'du' and with 'sort.'

Get yesterday's date or a previous time
With this command you can get a previous or future date or time. Where can you use this? How about finding all files modified or created in the last 5 mins? touch -t `echo $(date -d "5 minute ago" "+%G%m%d%H%M.%S")` me && find . -type f -newer me List all directories created since last week? touch -t `echo $(date -d "1 week ago" "+%G%m%d%H%M.%S")` me && find . -type d -cnewer me I'm sure you can think of more ways to use it. Requires coreutils package.

Get IP from host
I just wanted a simple DNS request. Because host and nslookup commands are not on all systems, we use getent instead. Thanks aulem for that tip.

Print all open regular files sorted by the number of file handles open to each.
List all open files of all processes. . $ find /proc/*/fd Look through the /proc file descriptors . $ -xtype f list only symlinks to file . $ -printf "%l\n" print the symlink target . $ grep -P '^/(?!dev|proc|sys)' ignore files from /dev /proc or /sys . $ sort | uniq -c | sort -n count the results . Many processes will create and immediately delete temporary files. These can the filtered out by adding: $ ... | grep -v " (deleted)$" | ...

port forwarding
pem file used by AWS servers for additional security

Map the slot of an I/O card to its PCI bus address
Recent hardware may or may not enumerate *both of* these values

List latest 5 modified files recursively
The output format is given by the -printf parameter: %T@ = modify time in seconds since Jan. 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT, with fractional part. Mandatory, hidden in the end. %TY-%Tm-%Td %TH:%TM:%.2TS = modify time as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. Optional. %p = file path Refer to http://linux.die.net/man/1/find for more about -printf formatting. ------------------------ sort -nr = sort numerically and reverse (higher values - most recent timestamp - first) head -n 5 = get only 5 first lines (change 5 to whatever you want) cut -f2- -d" " = trim first field (timestamp, used only for sorting) ------------------------ Very useful for building scripts for detecting malicious files upload and malware injections.

Display disk partition sizes
Use lsbk (list block) and jq (to manipulate a JSON on the command line) to display partition information:

scp a good script from host A which has no public access to host C, but with a hop by host B
middlehost allows ssh access from where you are but not securehost. Use nice ssh piping to simulate scp through A => B => C setting up the shell function if left as an exercise for the reader. ;-) Agent forwarding should avoid password typing.


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