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Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

Remove everything except that file
Remove everything except that file with shell tricks inside a subshell to avoid changes in the environment. $ help shopt

Convert current symbolic directory into physical directory

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

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Check disk for bad sectors
Checks HDD for bad sectors, just like scandisk or chkdisk under some other operating system ;-).

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Using xargs is better than: $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.

Get a brief overview of how many files and directories are installed
To start, you first need to make sure updatedb has been run/updatedb, and initialized the db: $ su -l root -c updatedb This locate command is provided through the mlocate package, installed by default on most GNU/Linux distributions. It's available on the BSDs as well. Not sure about support for proprietary UNIX systems. The output is self-explanatory- it provides an overview of how many directories and files are on your system.

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"


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