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extract content of a Debian package

replace a character/word/string in a file using vim
Replace all ocurrences in the file. The g option is to replace more than one occurrence in the same line. Whitout the g option, it only replace the first occurrence in the line.

Startup a VPN connection through command line

Shell function to create a menu of items which may be inserted into the X paste buffer.
The function will take a comma separated list of items to be 'selected' by xsel -i: $ smenu "First item to paste,Paste me #2,Third menu item" You will then be prompted to choose one of the menu items. After you choose, you will be able to paste the string by clicking the middle mouse button. The menu will keep prompting you to choose menu items until you break out with Control-C.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Use curl to save an MP3 stream
I use this with cron to timeshift radio programs from a station's live stream. You will get an error message at the end like "curl: (28) Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 185574 bytes received"; to suppress that but not other error messages, you can append "2>&1 | grep -v "(28)"" to the end of the command.

Add page numbers to a PDF
Put this code in a bash script. The script expects the PDF file as its only parameter. It will add a header to the PDF containing the page numbers and output it to a file with the suffix "-header.pdf" Requires enscript, ps2pdf and pdftk.

Connect to SMTP server using STARTTLS
Allows you to connect to an SMTP server over TLS, which is useful for debugging SMTP sessions. (Much like telnet to 25/tcp). Once connected you can manually issue SMTP commands in the clear (e.g. EHLO)

finding cr-lf files aka dos files with ^M characters
its useful to run dos2unix command later on them.

list files recursively by size


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