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Get the time since epoch
Get the time since epoch. Useful when working with commands and logs which use this format.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Generate a random password 30 characters long
Find random strings within /dev/urandom. Using grep filter to just Alphanumeric characters, and then print the first 30 and remove all the line feeds.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Mirror a directory structure from websites with an Apache-generated file indexes
wget/curl/friends are not good with mirroring files off websites, especially those with Apache-generated directory listings. These tools endlessly waste time downloading useless index HTML pages. lftp's mirror command does a better job without the mess.

Find the package that installed a command

Recursively remove Mac . (dot) files
Searches from present dir forward and removes all Mac generated . (dot) files.

Display command lines visible on commandlinefu.com homepage
Uses the fabulous Hpricot library to parse HTML from Ruby. Extracts all elements of "command' class and displays unescaped text from inside these elements. The following command can help install dependencies (apart from Ruby itself) $ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com && sudo gem install why-hpricot

Transfer SSH public key to another machine in one step
This command sequence allows simple setup of (gasp!) password-less SSH logins. Be careful, as if you already have an SSH keypair in your ~/.ssh directory on the local machine, there is a possibility ssh-keygen may overwrite them. ssh-copy-id copies the public key to the remote host and appends it to the remote account's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. When trying ssh, if you used no passphrase for your key, the remote shell appears soon after invoking ssh user@host.

Capture all plaintext passwords


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