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Recursive search inside the content of files under current directory - then view the result paginated with 'less'
This command will traverse all of the folders and subfolders under current working directory. For every file inside it, it will do a search inside the content of the file for a specific term 'what'. Then it will print a list of the lines that contain that term (and match that pattern). Each matching line will be preceded with the path and name to the file and then the line number iside taht file wehre the pattern was found. Then the actual content of the matching lien will be printed. The output will be piped throug less, so that the user can scroll through it if it goes beyond the limits of the current display window.

list files in mtime order
Simple but useful; list files in the current directory in mtime order. Useful if you've been working on something and then take a day or two off.

Number of CPU's in a system
/proc/cpuinfo contains information about the CPU. Search for "processor" in the /proc/cpuinfo file wc -l, counts the number of lines.

A command to copy mysql tables from a remote host to current host via ssh.
This version compresses the data for transport.

Check the hard disk vendor and model on Apple Mac

Find the dates your debian/ubuntu packages were installed.
Find when debian packages were installed on a system.

List every file that has ever existed in a git repository
What was the name of that module we wrote and deleted about 3 months ago? windowing-something? $ git log --all --pretty=format:" " --name-only | sort -u | grep -i window

Check if you need to run LaTeX to update the TOC
To check if the table-of-content in a LaTeX document is up-to-date, copy it to a backup before running LaTeX and compare the new .toc to the backup. If they are identical, it is updated. If not, you need to run LaTeX again.

generate random mac-address using md5sum + sed

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


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