Useful for checking if there are differences between local and remote files.

If you use Mac OS X or some other *nix variant that doesn't come with ssh-copy-id, this one-liner will allow you to add your public key to a remote machine so you can subsequently ssh to that machine without a password.

just make some data scrolling off the terminal. wow.

Forwards localhost:1234 to machine:port, running all data through your chain of piped commands. The above command logs inbound and outbound traffic to two files. Tip: replace tee with sed to manipulate the data in real time (use "sed -e 's/400 Bad Request/200 OK/'" to tweak a web server's responses ;-) Limitless possibilities.

Takes a input file (count.txt) that looks like: 1 2 3 4 5 It will add/sum the first column of numbers.

Have you ever had to scp a file to your work machine in order to copy its contents to a mail? xclip can help you with that. It copies its stdin to the X11 buffer, so all you have to do is middle-click to paste the content of that looong file :)

Maybe you know shorter ? Show Sample Output

Original author unknown (I believe off of a wifi hacking forum). Used in conjuction with ifconfig and cron.. can be handy (especially spoofing AP's) Show Sample Output

Busiest seconds: cat /var/log/secure.log | awk '{print substr($0,0,15)}' | uniq -c | sort -nr | awk '{printf("\n%s ",$0) ; for (i = 0; i<$1 ; i++) {printf("*")};}' Show Sample Output

This command lets you see and scroll through all of the strings that are stored in the RAM at any given time. Press space bar to scroll through to see more pages (or use the arrow keys etc). Sometimes if you don't save that file that you were working on or want to get back something you closed it can be found floating around in here! The awk command only shows lines that are longer than 20 characters (to avoid seeing lots of junk that probably isn't "human readable"). If you want to dump the whole thing to a file replace the final '| less' with '> memorydump'. This is great for searching through many times (and with the added bonus that it doesn't overwrite any memory...). Here's a neat example to show up conversations that were had in pidgin (will probably work after it has been closed)... sudo cat /proc/kcore | strings | grep '([0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\})' (depending on sudo settings it might be best to run sudo su first to get to a # prompt)

This will view the console and assumes the screen is 80 characters wide. Use /dev/vcs2 for the next virtual console.. etc. Show Sample Output

man tac When there is a bad block in the middle of your file, you can see its begninning with `cat' and its end with `tac'. But both commands terminates with an error. So this sequence rebuilds a new file without badblock. Show Sample Output

Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

Just run the command, type your password, and that's the last time you need to enter your password for that server. This assumes that the server supports publickey authentication. Also, the permissions on your home dir are 755, and the permissions on your .ssh dir are 700 (local and remote).

this leaves the cursor at the bottom of the terminal screen, where your eyes are. ctrl-l moves it to the top, forcing you to look up.

attribution: Thanks to repellent on perlmonks.org source: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=684459

I spent a bunch of time yesterday looking for the xsel package in Cygwin- turns out you can use the /dev/clipboard device to do the same thing. Show Sample Output

This helped me find a botnet that had made into my system. Of course, this is not a foolproof or guarantied way to find all of them or even most of them. But it helped me find it.

When dealing with system resource limits like max number of processes and open files per user, it can be hard to tell exactly what's happening. The /etc/security/limits.conf file defines the ceiling for the values, but not what they currently are, while ulimit -a will show you the current values for your shell, and you can set them for new logins in /etc/profile and/or ~/.bashrc with a command like: ulimit -S -n 100000 >/dev/null 2>&1 But with the variability in when those files get read (login vs any shell startup, interactive vs non-interactive) it can be difficult to know for sure what values apply to processes that are currently running, like database or app servers. Just find the PID via "ps aux | grep programname", then look at that PID's "limits" file in /proc. Then you'll know for sure what actually applies to that process. Show Sample Output

using cat WAR_AND_PEACE_By_LeoTolstoi.txt | tr -cs "[:alnum:]" "\n"| tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sort -S16M | uniq -c |sort -nr | cat -n | head -n 30 ("sort -S1G" - Linux/GNU sort only) will also do the job but as some drawbacks (caused by space/time complexity of sorting) for bigger files... Show Sample Output

Works for most distributions, tested on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Gentoo, SUSE, RedHat. Debian and Slackware: cat /etc/*version Show Sample Output

Using OpenSSL we can encrypt any input we wish and then use Netcat to create a socket which can be connected to from an externally source (even using a Web Browser)