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Close a hanging ssh session
~ is the ssh control character. If you type it after a newline, you can example force close the ssh session. , ~, then . If you want more info, type ~? when you are connecting using ssh. Very useful to kill of any hanging ssh sessions when nothing else works.

Schedule Nice Background Commands That Won't Die on Logout - Alternative to nohup and at
Check out the usage of 'trap', you may not have seen this one much. This command provides a way to schedule commands at certain times by running them after sleep finishes sleeping. In the example 'sleep 2h' sleeps for 2 hours. What is cool about this command is that it uses the 'trap' builtin bash command to remove the SIGHUP trap that normally exits all processes started by the shell upon logout. The 'trap 1' command then restores the normal SIGHUP behaviour. It also uses the 'nice -n 19' command which causes the sleep process to be run with minimal CPU. Further, it runs all the commands within the 2nd parentheses in the background. This is sweet cuz you can fire off as many of these as you want. Very helpful for shell scripts.

Download a file securely via a remote SSH server
This command will download $file via server. I've used this when FTP was broken at the office and I needed to download some software packages.

Extract title from HTML files
previous version leaves lots of blank lines

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

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

Start dd and show progress every X seconds

monitor network traffic and throughput in real time
see http://iptraf.seul.org/ for all kinds of documentation and screenshots

Terminal redirection
Will redirect output of current session to another terminal, e.g. /dev/pts/3 Courtesy of bassu, http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/by/bassu

To create files with specific permission:


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