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how to find the active X (X11/xorg) username and DISPLAY variable
Requires consolekit (works in e.g. Ubuntu). Here x11-display is DISPLAY

sort lines by length

Play radio stream with mplayer
Above command will play Virgin Radio Dubai

Google Spell Checker
I took matthewbauer's cool one-liner and rewrote it as a shell function that returns all the suggestions or outputs "OK" if it doesn't find anything wrong. It should work on ksh, zsh, and bash. Users that don't have tee can leave that part off like this: $spellcheck(){ typeset y=$@;curl -sd "$y" https://google.com/tbproxy/spell|sed -n '/s="[1-9]"/{s/]*>/ /g;s/\t/ /g;s/ *\(.*\)/Suggestions: \1\n/g;p}';}

shell bash iterate number range with for loop
Bash's arithmetic evaluation.

Find all files currently open in Vim and/or gVim
Catches .swp, .swo, .swn, etc. If you have access to lsof, it'll give you more compressed output and show you the associated terminals (e.g., pts/5, which you could then use 'w' to figure out where it's originating from): lsof | grep '\.sw.$' If you have swp files turned off, you can do something like: ps x | grep '[g,v]im', but it won't tell you about files open in buffers, via :e [file].

A simple way to securely use passwords on the command line or in scripts
In this example, where the users gpg keyring has a password, the user will be interactively prompted for the keyring password. If the keyring has no password, same as above, sans the prompt. Suitable for cron jobs. ~/.gnupg/passwd/http-auth.gpg is the encrypted http auth password, for this particular wget use case. This approach has many use cases. example bash functions: function http_auth_pass() { gpg2 --decrypt ~/.gnupg/passwd/http-auth.gpg 2>/dev/null; } function decrypt_pass() { gpg2 --decrypt ~/.gnupg/passwd/"$1" 2>/dev/null; }

shell equivalent of a boss button
Nobody wants the boss to notice when you're slacking off. This will fill your shell with random data, parts of it highlighted. Note that 'highlight' is the Perl module App::highlight, not "a universal sourcecode to formatted text converter." You'll also need Term::ANSIColor.

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

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" }


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