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Delete all but the latest 5 files, ignoring directories

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

Clean up display when the bash prompt is displayed
This will cause bash to fix a garbled terminal before the prompt is printed. For example, if you cat a file with nonprintable character sequences, the terminal sometimes ends up in a mode where it only prints line drawing characters. This sequence will return the terminal to the standard character set after every command.

Convert A USB Cable Into A Smart Home Gadget
An old USB A/B cable is all you need to make your own Smart Home hardware! Cut off and discard the B-portion of the USB cable. On the A side, connect the RED (+) and WHITE (D-) wires via a 1 kiloohm resistor. $Picture: http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU Now plug the cable into a USB port on your Linux computer. Your hardware is ready! Run the above command after changing variable mysms to your personal email-to-SMS gateway info as required by your cellular service provider. The command uses the amazing usbmon tool (see link below) to detect the cable. For the curious, to view the raw usbmon output, run this command: (Also see the sample output) $usbmon -i usb0 How does it work? When the red and white wires are connected (via the 1 kiloohm resistor) the USB hardwere is tricked into thinking that a new USB device is trying to start up. We then use the usbmon utility to capture the host USB events as it tries to talk to the cable. The expect utility watches the usbmon stream and waits for the disconnect text "-2:128" before sending the SMS message. Finally, the sendmail tool is used to email the SMS message to your smartphone via your cellular provider's SMS-to-email gateway. As a result, when the electrical connection between the red and white wire is interrupted, or the USB cable is unplugged from your computer, you get an SMS notification of the disconnect event on your smartphone. Could this be the cheapest smart home gadget ever? What are YOU going to sense with it? Please let me know in the comments and please don't forget to click it up! $ $Links: $ http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/8/usbmon/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Pinouts http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU

Faster find and move using the find and xargs commands. Almost as fast as locate.
Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type.

Show a script or config file without comments or blank lines

Set blanket packet/second limit on network interface for Ubuntu VPS server
VPS server hosts suspect DOS attack if PPS is too high. This limits packets at the interface level. Do "sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent" to make persistent, or, if you already have, reconfigure with "sudo dpkg-reconfigure iptables-persistent"

Share your terminal session real-time
One person does `mkfifo foo; script -f foo' and another can supervise real-time what is being done using `cat foo'.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Copy something to multiple SSH hosts with a Bash loop
Just a quick and simple one to demonstrate Bash For loop. Copies 'file' to multiple ssh hosts.


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