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a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
The function 'box' takes either one or two arguments. The first argument is a line of text to be boxed, the second argument (optional) is a character to use to draw the box. By default, the drawing character will be '='. The function 'n()' is a helper function used to draw the upper and lower lines of the box, its arguments are a length, and an character to print. (I used 'n' because 'line', 'ln' and 'l' are all commonly used)

Prevent overwriting file when using redirection
If you set noclobber to on, bash won't allow redirection to overwrite existing files . $ set -o noclobber command turn the option on (default it s off ) . You can still append information but not overwrite the file .to turn it back off use : $ set +o noclobber . I use it because i overwrite a file by accident , after thought , content of the file was very important , creating a one more file mean nothing for my hard disk (we are not anymore on the 64 k memory time) , but content of file is far much important . What we call exeprience :(

Quickly (soft-)reboot skipping hardware checks
If you are doing some tests which require reboots (e. g. startup skripts, kernel module parameters, ...), this is very time intensive, if you have got a hardware with a long pre-boot phase due to hardware checks. At this time, kexec can help, which only restarts the kernel with all related stuff. First the kernel to be started is loaded, then kexec -e jumps up to start it. Is as hard as a reboot -f, but several times faster (e. g. 1 Minute instead of 12 on some servers here).

Function to change prompt
Bash function to change your default prompt to something simpler and restore it to normal afterwards.

Command to logout all the users in one command
Logs all users out except root. I changed the grep to use a regexp in case a user's username contained the word root.

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

Download an entire website
-p parameter tells wget to include all files, including images. -e robots=off you don't want wget to obey by the robots.txt file -U mozilla as your browsers identity. --random-wait to let wget chose a random number of seconds to wait, avoid get into black list. Other Useful wget Parameters: --limit-rate=20k limits the rate at which it downloads files. -b continues wget after logging out. -o $HOME/wget_log.txt logs the output

The command used by applications in OS X to determine whether a plist is "good". from Ed Marczak.
The check an entire folder is a one-liner: plutil -lint * | grep -v OK$ from Ed Marczak

Take screenshot through SSH
When connected to a box via ssh you can do a quick screenshot of that box using this command. After that you can rscp it over to your box and look at it.

unbuffered tcpdump
Sometimes the question comes up: How to get unbuffered tcpdump output into the next program in the pipe? i.e. if your OS forces you to wait for the buffer to fill before the next program sees any of the output If you use -Uw- then you can't use -A (or -X or -XX) at the same time. When the question comes up, I've never seen anyone suggest this simple solution: chaining 2 tcpdump instances.


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