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Check your hard drive for bad blocks (destructive)
WARNING!!! ALL DATA WILL BE LOST!!! This command should ONLY be run on drives that are meant to be wiped. Data destruction will result from running this command with the '-w' switch. You may run this command with the '-n' switch in place of '-w' if you want to retain all data on the drive, however, the test won't be as detailed, since the '-n' switch provides a non-destructive read-write mode only, whereas '-w' switch actually writes patterns while scanning for bad blocks.

Get a range of SVN revisions from svn diff and tar gz them
Handy when you need to create a list of files to be updated when subversion is not available on the remote host. You can take this tar file, and upload and extract it where you need it. Replace M and N with the revisions specific to yours. Make sure you do this from an updated (svn up) working directory.

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
If you can install rpl it's simpler to use and faster than combinations of find, grep and sed. See man rpl for various options. time on above operation: real 0m0.862s, user 0m0.548s, sys 0m0.180s using find + sed: real 0m3.546s, user 0m1.752s, sys 0m1.580s

.inputrc keybinding to wrap current line in inotifytools for instant compile/test-as-you-save-loop
Assuming you've written all of make -j hfst-tokenize && echo doavtter gr?dakursa|./hfst-tokenize --gtd tokeniser-gramcheck-gt-desc.pmhfst and want that to execute every time you :w in vim (or C-xC-s in Emacs), just hit and it'll turn into $ while true; do ( make -j hfst-tokenize && e doavtter gr?dakursa|./hfst-tokenize --gtd tokeniser-gramcheck-gt-desc.pmhfst ); inotifywait -q -e modify -e close_write *; done with the cursor right before the ')'. Hit enter, and it'll run on each save. Requires the package inotify-tools installed.

Count number of Line for all the files in a directory recursively

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

Better git diff, word delimited and colorized
I've been using colordiff for years. wdiff is the new fav, except its colors. Word delimited diffs are more interleaved, easing the chore of associating big blocks of changes.

Convert diff output to HTML ins/del

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"

Count lines in a file with grep
Returns the number of lines in a file, emulates "wc -l" behavior with grep.


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