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list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

get the latest version
to download latest version of "util", maybe insert a sort if they wont be shown in right order. curl lists all files on mirror, grep your util, tail -1 will gets the one lists on the bottom and get it with wget

Most simple way to get a list of open ports

force a rescan on a host of scsi devices (useful for adding partitions to vmware on the fly)

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)
A shell function using perl to easily convert Unix-time to text. Put in in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent. Tested on Linux / Solaris Bourne, bash and zsh. using perl 5.6 and higher. (Does not require GNU date like some other commands)

How to copy CD/DVD into hard disk (.iso)
A dear friend of mine asked me how do I copy a DVD to your hard drive? If you want to make a copy of the ISO image that was burned to a CD or DVD, insert that medium into your CD/DVD drive and (assuming /dev/cdrom is associated with your computer?s CD drive) type the following command

Delete more than one month old thumbnails from home directory
By time thumbnail images in ~/thumbnails take up too much space, this command will help deleting old ones. Find options explained: -type f : find files only, not directories -atime +30 : last accessed more than 30 days ago

Change a specific value in a path
Awk replaces the value of a specific field while retaining the field separator "/" .

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

use wget to check if a remote file exists
put your link [url] to check if exist the remote file


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