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Attach screen over ssh
Directly attach a remote screen session (saves a useless parent bash process)

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

Indicates the position of my monitor buttons
I often need to change the brightness of my monitor. The symbols of the sensor buttons are not illuminated and on a black background .... invisible! Now i use osd_cat instead of a torch ;-)

Watch how fast the files in a drive are being deleted
This can be useful when a large remove operation is taking place.

Combine multiple images into a video using ffmpeg
The -start_number can be ignored if sequence starts with 0, otherwise use first number in sequence

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS
Shorter version, works with multiple words.

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

dd with progress bar and statistics
This command utilizes 'pv' to show dd's progress. Notes on use with dd: -- dd block size (bs=...) is a widely debated command-line switch and should usually be between 1024 and 4096. You won't see much performance improvements beyond 4096, but regardless of the block size, dd will transfer every bit of data. -- pv's switch, '-s' should be as close to the size of the data source as possible. -- dd's out file, 'of=...' can be anything as the data within that file are the same regardless of the filename / extension.

remove all snapshots from all virtual machines in vmware esx
Old snapshots can cause problems. It's best to remove them when finished. I use this script to remove all snapshots. The "while read" command is necessary because my vm names contain spaces. The "time" command reports how long the process runs.

Unbelievable Shell Colors, Shading, Backgrounds, Effects for Non-X
I've been using linux for almost a decade and only recently discovered that most terminals like putty, xterm, xfree86, vt100, etc., support hundreds of shades of colors, backgrounds and text/terminal effects. This simply prints out a ton of them, the output is pretty amazing. If you use non-x terminals all the time like I do, it can really be helpful to know how to tweak colors and terminal capabilities. Like: $ echo $'\33[H\33[2J'


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