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Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

Rename a file with a random name
Give files a random name (don't ask why :-) The function will rename files but maintain their extensions. BUG: If a file doesn't have an extension it will end up with a dot at the end of the name. The parameter '8' for pwgen controls the length of filenames - eight random characters.

monitor a tail -f command with multiple processes
when using named pipes only one reader is given the output by default. Also, most commands piped to by grep use a buffer which save output until tail -f finishes, which is not convenient. Here, using a combination of tee, sub-processes and the --line-buffered switch in grep we can workaround the problem.

Display a list of RPMs installed on a particular date
Find out which RPMs were installed on a particular date. These would (naturally) include update RPMs. This example shows searching for "Thu 05 Mar" (with grep). Alternatively, pipe it to less so you can search inside less (with less's neat text highlighting of the search term): rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} \"%{vendor}\" %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | less # (this example) search term: Thu 05 Mar

give a binary the ability to open ports below 1024 as non root user
Binding a server to privileged port on Linux w/o running as root This is applicable to any service using privileged ports (< 1024), for instance to run a HTTP server on port 80 or a LDAP directory server on port 389 for example.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Get the 10 biggest files/folders for the current direcotry

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Rsync remote data as root using sudo
If your user has sudo on the remote box, you can rsync data as root without needing to login as root. This is very helpful if the remote box does not allow root to login over SSH (which is a common security restriction).

tar exclude files or directories
If you want to exclude only one file or directory you should use as --exclude=file_or_directory


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