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archlinux: check which repository packages have updates available
Shows which packages from the official repositories (not aur) have updates available. For most accurate output, the mirrors and package lists should be up to date.

tar the current directory wihtout the absolute path
tars the current directory (and its children) in an archive of the same name (plus ".tar" :)) in the parent directory without the absolute path, so that when the archive is extracted, only the current directory name is created for the path. Assumes bash/zsh.

Watch the National Debt clock
The idea was originally stolen from Linux Journal. 'wget' pulls the debt clock and 'sed' reformats it for general consumption. Prefacing the command with 'watch' simply sets an interval - in this case every 10 seconds.

Google URL shortener
use curl and sed to shorten an url via goo.gl

Write and read HDD external
Write and read HDD external FreeBSD

A command line calculator in Perl
Once I wrote a command line calculator program in C, then I found this... and added to it a bit. For ease of use I normally use this in a tiny Perl program (which I call pc for 'Perl Calculator') #!/usr/bin/perl -w die "Usage: $0 MATHS\n" unless(@ARGV);for(@ARGV){s/x/*/g;s/v/sqrt /g;s/\^/**/g}; print eval(join('',@ARGV)),$/; It handles square roots, power, modulus: $ pc 1+2 (1 plus 2) 3 $ pc 3x4 (3 times 4) 12 $ pc 5^6 (5 to the power of 6) 15625 $ pc v 49 ( square root of 49 ) 7 $ pc 12/3 (12 divided by 3) 4 $ pc 19%4 (19 modulus 4) 3 (you can string maths together too) $ pc 10 x 10 x 10 1000 $ pc 10 + 10 + 10 / 2 25 $ pc 7 x v49 49

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

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Perl oneliner to print access rights in octal format
This prints file access rights in octal - useful when "stat" is unavailable.


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