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Remount a usb disk in Gnome without physically removing and reinserting
Remounts a usb disk /dev/sdb, without having to physically remove and reinsert. (Gnome desktop)

Outputs files with ascii art in the intended form.
Files containing ascii art (e.g. with .nfo extension) are typically not correctly reproduced at the command line when using cat. With iconv one can easily write a wrapper to solve this: $ #!/bin/bash $ if [ -z "$@" ]; then echo "Usage: $(basename $0) file [file] ..." $ else iconv -f437 -tutf8 "$@"; fi $ exit 0

Run TOP in Color, split 4 ways for x seconds - the ultimate ps command. Great for init scripts
One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000! $ G=$(stty -g);stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2));top -n1; stty $G;unset G Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well. # save the correct settings to G var. $ G=$(stty -g) # change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise $ stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2)) # run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least) $ top -n1 # reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself $ stty $G;unset G This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this! Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ] Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed

Encode file path to URL
Really helpfull when play with files having spaces an other bad name. Easy to store and access names and path in just a field while saving it in a file. This format (URL) is directly supported by nautilus and firefox (and other browsers)

port scan using parallel
It takes over 5 seconds to scan a single port on a single host using nmap $ time (nmap -p 80 192.168.1.1 &> /dev/null) real 0m5.109s user 0m0.102s sys 0m0.004s It took netcat about 2.5 minutes to scan port 80 on the class C $ time (for NUM in {1..255} ; do nc -w 1 -z -v 192.168.1.${NUM} 80 ; done &> /dev/null) real 2m28.651s user 0m0.136s sys 0m0.341s Using parallel, I am able to scan port 80 on the entire class C in under 2 seconds $ time (seq 1 255 | parallel -j255 'nc -w 1 -z -v 192.168.1.{} 80' &> /dev/null) real 0m1.957s user 0m0.457s sys 0m0.994s

Print entire field if string is detected in column
It searches for a specific value in the specified column and if it finds it it'll print the whole field/row. Similarly, if you don't know what you're looking for exactly but want to exclude something you're already aware of, you can exclude that "something: awk '{ if ($column != "string") print $0}'

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions (no echo)
Write a file you edited in Vim but that you do not have the permissions to write to (unless you use sudo.) Same as #1204 but without the echo to stdout that I find annoying.

Execute a command without saving it in the history
Prepending one or more spaces to your command won't be saved in history. Useful for pr0n or passwords on the commandline. Tested on BASH.

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 and delete files older than one year


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