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Enable ** to expand files recursively (>=bash-4.0)
Since bash 4.0, you can use ** to recursively expand to all files in the current directory. This behaviour is disabled by default, this command enables it (you'd best put it in your .profile). See the sample output for clarification. In my opinion this is much better than creating hacks with find and xargs when you want to pass files to an application.

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"

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.

Database size
Mysql command to list the disk usage of the database

Generate diff of first 500 lines of two files
Useful for massive files where doing a full diff would take too long. This just runs diff on the first 500 lines of each. The use of subshells to feed STDIN is quite a useful construct.

how to export a table in .csv file
Exports the result of query in a csv file

Set Time Zone in Ubuntu
Reconfigures time zone in Ubuntu, which I cannot figure out how to do through the GUI. Worked like a charm to set my time zone to CEST from EDT.

Find broken symlinks
Locate broken symlinks in the current directory. Also useful, to remove broken links: $ find . -type l ! -exec test -e {} \; -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls

Continually monitor things
You can use this one-liner for a quick and dirty (more customizable) alternative to the watch command. The keys to making this work: everything exists in an infinite loop; the loop starts with a clear; the loop ends with a sleep. Enter whatever you'd like to keep an eye on in the middle.


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