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Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL

hanukkah colored bash prompt
blue and yellow colored bash prompt for a Hanukkah celebration on your box

Bitcoin Brainwallet Private Key Calculator
A bitcoin "brainwallet" is a secret passphrase you carry in the "wallet" of your brain. The Bitcoin Brainwallet Private Key Calculator calculates the standard base58 encoded bitcoin private key from your "brainwallet" passphrase. The private key is the most important bitcoin number. All other numbers can be derived from it. This command uses 3 other functions - all 3 are defined on my user page: 1) brainwallet_exponent() - search for Bitcoin Brainwallet Exponent Calculator 2) brainwallet_checksum() - search for Bitcoin Brainwallet Exponent Calculator 3) b58encode() - search for Bitcoin Brainwallet Base58 Encoder Do make sure you use really strong, unpredictable passphrases (30+ characters)! http:brainwallet.org can be used to check the accuracy of this calculator.

Resize a Terminal Window
Replace 70 with the desired height. Replace 180 with the desired width. I put it in my bashrc, because by default my terminal is too small.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

list all opened ports on host

Backup a file with a date-time stamp
1. you don't need to prepend the year with 20 - just use Y instead of y 2. you may want to make your function a bit more secure: buf () { cp ${1?filename not specified}{,$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)}; }

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions
probably just like 1204, but uses tee as a filter (+ I actually understand how this one works)

Read and write to TCP or UDP sockets with common bash tools
Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

Print all lines in a file that are not a certain length
Alternatively, print all the lines that are a certain length: $awk 'length($0)==12 {print}' your_file_name


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