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pretend to be busy in office to enjoy a cup of coffee
Create a progress dialog with custom title and text using zenity.

Simplest port scanner
Very handy way to perform a host scan if you don't have nmap,ncat,nc ...or other tools installed locally. When executing a command on a /dev/tcp/$host/$port pseudo-device file, Bash opens a TCP connection to the associated socket and UDP connection when using /dev/udp/$host/$port.A simlpe way to get servers banner is to run this command "cat < /dev/tcp/localhost/25" , here you will get mail server's banner. NOTE: Bash, as packaged for Debian, does not support using the /dev/tcp and /dev/udp pseudo-device it's not enabled by default Because bash in Debian is compiled with ?disable-net-redirections.

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.

Compare copies of a file with md5
I had the problem that the Md5 Sum of a file changed after copying it to my external disk. This unhandy command helped me to fix the problem.

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
When using tcpdump, specify -U option to prevent buffering.

Determine if a command is in your $PATH using POSIX
it is generally advised to avoid using which(1) whenever possible. which(1) is usually a csh(1) script, or sometimes a compiled binary. It's output is highly variable from operating system to operating system, so platform independent scripts could become quite complicated with the logic. On HP-UX 10.20, for example, it prints "no bash in /path /path /path ..."; on OpenBSD 4.1, it prints "bash: Command not found."; on Debian (3.1 through 5.0 at least) and SuSE, it prints nothing at all; on Red Hat 5.2, it prints "which: no bash in (/path:/path:...)"; on Red Hat 6.2, it writes the same message, but on standard error instead of standard output; and on Gentoo, it writes something on stderr. And given all these differences, it's still variable based on your shell. This is why POSIX is king. See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/081 for more ways on avoiding which(1).

Create .pdf from .doc
sudo apt-get install wv tetex-extra ghostscript

Find passwords that has been stored as plain text in NetworkManager

get all Amazon cloud (amazonws etc) ipv6 subnets

list files recursively by size


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