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To find which host made maximum number of specific tcp connections
This command is primarily going to work on linux boxes. and needs to be changed, for example IP=10\.194\.194\.2 PORT=389

Enter a command but keep it out of the history
Put a space in front of your command on the command line and it will not be logged as part of your command line history.

Burn CD/DVD from an iso, eject disc when finished.
cdrecord -scanbus will tell you the (x,y,z) value of your cdr (for example, mine is 3,0,0)

remove leading blank lines

Find the package that installed a command

Collect a lot of icons from /usr/share/icons (may overwrite some, and complain a bit)
Today I needed to choose an icon for an app. My simpler way: put all of /usr/share/icons in myicons folder and brows'em with nautilus. Then rm -r 'ed the entire dir.

Convert one file from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
Nothing fancy it just converts one file from one character encoding into another one.

Merges given files line by line
In the above example all files have 4 lines. In "file1" consecutive lines are: "num, 1, 2, 3", in "file2": "name, Jack, Jim, Frank" and in "file3": "scores, 1300, 1100, 980". This one liner can save considerate ammount of time when you're trying to process serious portions of data. "-d" option allows one to set series of characters to be used as separators between data originating from given files.

Buffer in order to avoir mistakes with redirections that empty your files
A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file. It can be easily avoided because of : 1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file" 2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file. Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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