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Synchronize date and time with a server over ssh
Set Remote Server Date using Local Server Time (push)

Detect if we are running on a VMware virtual machine
If you run this command on a VMWare Virtual Machine, it will return the string "VMware Virtual Platform". If you run it on a physical machine, it will return nothing. Useful for having a script determine if it's running on a VM or not. Of course, you must have dmidecode installed for this to work. Try it this way in a script: ISVM=$(dmidecode | awk '/VMware Virtual Platform/ {print $3,$4,$5}') Then test if $ISVM has text in it, or is blank.

bash/ksh function: given a file, cd to the directory it lives
fcd : file change directory A bash function that takes a fully qualified file path and cd's into the directory where it lives. Useful on the commadline when you have a file name in a variable and you'd like to cd to the directory to RCS check it in or look at other files associated with it. Will run on any ksh, bash, likely sh, maybe zsh.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

apt-get upgrade with bandwidth limit
Trickle is here: http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle Trickle is a simple bandwidth limiter

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

shell function to underline a given string.
underline() will print $1, followed by a series of '=' characters the width of $1. An optional second argument can be used to replace '=' with a given character. This function is useful for breaking lots of data emitted in a for loop into sections which are easier to parse visually. Let's say that 'xxxx' is a very common pattern occurring in a group of CSV files. You could run $ grep xxxx *.csv This would print the name of each csv file before each matching line, but the output would be hard to parse visually. $ for i in *.csv; do printf "\n"; underline $i; grep "xxxx" $i; done Will break the output into sections separated by the name of the file, underlined.

Allow any local (non-network) connection to running X server

Find the biggest files
Show the top 10 file size

Check your bash shell for vulnerability to the ShellShock exploit
If this command prints 'x' then your shell is vulnerable. Null output confirms that you are protected. Further reading: http://allanmcrae.com/2014/09/shellshock-and-arch-linux/


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