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Rename files in batch

Customer Friendly free
makes more sense to customers XD

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Configure a serial line device so you can evaluate it with a shell script
I had a hard time in finding the correct settings to get reasonable output from a coin selector which sends its data over a serial line. In the end, minicom came to the rescue and pointed me on the right track. So, if you need to do something similar, these settings may help you. Replace ttyUSB0 with your device file, 9600 with your baud rate, 5 with your read timeout (10ths of a second), and 1 with the minimum numbers of characters you want to read. You can then open the device file like you are used to do, example: $ DATA="`xxd -ps -l 5 \"$DEV\"`"

Congratulations on new year
Requires installed command line PHP. Also, try at different dimensions of terminal window

ssh tunnel with auto reconnect ability

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

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

Temporarily ignore known SSH hosts
you may create an alias also, which I did ;-) alias sshu="ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null "

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.


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