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sed : using colons as separators instead of forward slashes
Having to escape forwardslashes when using sed can be a pain. However, it's possible to instead of using / as the separator to use : . I found this by trying to substitute $PWD into my pattern, like so $ sed "s/~.*/$PWD/" file.txt Of course, $PWD will expand to a character string that begins with a / , which will make sed spit out an error such as "sed: -e expression #1, char 8: unknown option to `s'". So simply changing it to $ sed "s:~.*:$PWD:" file.txt did the trick.

Find files that are older than x days
Find files that are older than x days in the working directory and list them. This will recurse all the sub-directories inside the working directory. By changing the value for -mtime, you can adjust the time and by replacing the ls command with, say, rm, you can remove those files if you wish to.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

List top ten files/directories sorted by size

Resets a terminal that has been messed up by binary input

Print unique ipaddresses as they come in from Apache Access Log File
Prints the unique IP Addresses as they arrive from an Apache `access.log` file. The '-W interactive' tells awk to start writing to stdout immediately and not buffer the output. This command builds on the uniq lines without sorting command (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4389/remove-duplicate-entries-in-a-file-without-sorting.)

How many files in the current directory ?
A simple "ls" lists files *and* directories. So we need to "find" the files (type 'f') only. As "find" is recursive by default we must restrict it to the current directory by adding a maximum depth of "1". If you should be using the "zsh" then you can use the dot (.) as a globbing qualifier to denote plain files: zsh> ls *(.) | wc -l for more info see the zsh's manual on expansion and substitution - "man zshexpn".

Get your outgoing IP address
Instead of opening your browser, googling "whatismyip"... Also useful for scripts. dig can be found in the dnsutils package.

Count occurrences per minute in a log file
The cut should match the relevant timestamp part of the logfile, the uniq will count the number of occurrences during this time interval.

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
Next time you are using your shell, try typing $ ctrl-x ctrl-e # in emacs mode or $ v # in vi mode The shell will take what you've written on the command line thus far and paste it into the editor specified by $EDITOR. Then you can edit at leisure using all the powerful macros and commands of vi, emacs, nano, or whatever.


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