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check open ports without netstat or lsof

Get the full path to a file
Useful in scripts when the file is passed in as an argument. Eg. $ filepath=$(realpath $1)

Create an easy to pronounce shortened URL from CLI
Just add this function to your .zshrc / .bashrc, and by typing "shout *URL*" you get a randomly chosen English word that ShoutKey.com uses to short your URL. You may now go to shoutkey.com/*output_word* and get redirected. The URL will be valid for 5 minutes. (I've never used sed before, so I'll be quite glad if someone could straighten up the sed commands and combine them (perhaps also removing the whitespace). If so, I'll update it right away ;) )

Paste command output to www.pastehtml.com in txt format.
paste(){ curl -s -S --data-urlencode "txt=$($@)" "http://pastehtml.com/upload/create?input_type=txt&result=address";echo;}

Rsync using SSH and outputing results to a text file
--delete will delete copies on remote to match local if deleted on local --stats will output the results -z zip -a archive -A preserve ACL -x don't cross filesystem boundaries -h human readable -e specify the remote shell to use

Disconnect telnet
You are stuck with testing a tcp port using telnet, and must kill the telnet session from another terminal... Or, press ctrl+5 and write close/quit to force the current connection to close..

Start a quick rsync daemon for fast copying on internal secure network
"Sample output" shows a minimalistic configuration file.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Merge PDFs with Ghostscript wrapped in a function
This is an expansion on a previous entry, which I've wrapped in a function and placed in my profile. The "$@" is a positional parameter, much like "$*", but the parameters are passed on intact, without interpretation or expansion; so you can simply call the function like this: mergepdf * This will output a merged PDF of all PDFs in the current directory. Alternatively, you can simply list them like so: mergepdf 00.pdf 01.pdf 02.pdf ... N.B. Passing a wildcard will merge all PDFs in the current directory in name order, e.g. 00.pdf 01.pdf aa.pdf ab.pdf

Remote Serial connection redirected over network using SSH
Requires software found at: http://lpccomp.bc.ca/remserial/ Remote [A] (with physical serial port connected to device) $./remserial -d -p 23000 -s "115200 raw" /dev/ttyS0 & Local [B] (running the program that needs to connect to serial device) Create a SSH tunnel to the remote server: $ssh -N -L 23000:localhost:23000 user@hostwithphysicalserialport Use the locally tunnelled port to connect the local virtual serial port to the remote real physical port: $./remserial -d -r localhost -p 23000 -l /dev/remser1 /dev/ptmx & Example: Running minicom on machine B using serial /dev/remser1 will actually connect you to whatever device is plugged into machine A's serial port /dev/ttyS0.


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