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Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Get absolut path to your bash-script
Another way of doing it that's a bit clearer. I'm a fan of readable code.

Backup a filesystem to a remote machine and use cstream to throttle bandwidth of the backup
This command will nicely dump a filesystem to STDOUT, compress it, encrypt it with the gpg key of your choice, throttle the the data stream to 60kb/s and finally use ssh to copy the contents to an image on a remote machine.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Have a random "cow" say a random thing
You need to have fortune and cowsay installed. It uses a subshell to list cow files in you cow directory (this folder is default for debian based systems, others might use another folder). you can add it to your .bashrc file to have it great you with something interesting every time you start a new session.

unbuffered tcpdump
Sometimes the question comes up: How to get unbuffered tcpdump output into the next program in the pipe? i.e. if your OS forces you to wait for the buffer to fill before the next program sees any of the output If you use -Uw- then you can't use -A (or -X or -XX) at the same time. When the question comes up, I've never seen anyone suggest this simple solution: chaining 2 tcpdump instances.

locate a filename, make sure it exists and display it with full details
use the locate command to find files on the system and verify they exist (-e) then display each one in full details.

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"

List all execs in $PATH, usefull for grepping the resulting list
While it seems (to me at least) a little counter-intuitive to filter on name first, this requires less work for find, as it allows it to immediately discount any files that do not match the name directly from the directory listing on disk. Querying against file attributes requires reading the file attributes, which is performed for all files matching any name based predicates.

check open ports (both ipv4 and ipv6)
Check open TCP and UDP ports


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