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Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
As of this writing, this requires a fairly recent version of util-linux, but is much simpler than the previous alternatives. Basically, lsblk gives a nice, human readable interface to all the blkid stuff. (Of course, I wouldn't recommend this if you're going to be parsing the output.) This command takes all the fun out of the previous nifty pipelines, but I felt I ought to at least mention it as an alternative since it is the most practical.

Get a list of the top 10 heaviest tables in your mysql database - useful for performance diagnostics

Get the IP address

Download Apple movie trailers
Copy the link to an HD movie trailer in to this command. It's more eleganant if it's put in a to a script, taking the URL as input.

List apache2 virtualhosts
Lists virtualhosts currently enabled for apache2, showing the ServerName:port, conf file and DocumentRoot

Get your external IP address ( 10 characters long )
Shortest url to a external IP-service, 10 characters.

diff two svn repos ignoring spaces,tabs and svnfiles

find all active IP addresses in a network
I just added the args [arp-scan --localnet] which works for Debian users, because the package 'arp' has name 'arp-scan', and it doesn't works with the argument 'arp'.

Convert a Nero Image File to ISO
This line removes the 300k header from a Nero image file converting it to ISO format

Test your total disk IO capacity, regardless of caching, to find out how fast the TRUE speed of your disks are
Depending on the speed of you system, amount of RAM, and amount of free disk space, you can find out practically how fast your disks really are. When it completes, take the number of MB copied, and divide by the line showing the "real" number of seconds. In the sample output, the cached value shows a write speed of 178MB/s, which is unrealistic, while the calculated value using the output and the number of seconds shows it to be more like 35MB/s, which is feasible.


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