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start vim in diff mode
vim will open both files side by side and show colored diffs

Easily find latex package documentation
If the pdf/dvi/etc documentation for a latex package is already part of your local texmf tree, then texdoc will find and display it for you. If the documentation is not available on your system, it will bring up the package's webpage at CTAN to help you investigate.

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).

Killing processes with your mouse in an infinite loop
Useful for quickly cleaning your Desktop. Nice joke if launched at startup.

dump a remote db via ssh and populate local db with postgres

Check if it's your binary birthday!
Print out your age in days in binary. Today's my binary birthday, I'm 2^14 days old :-) . This command does bash arithmatic $(( )) on two dates: Today: $(date +%s) Date of birth: $(date +%s -d YYYY-MM-DD) The dates are expressed as the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (Jan 1970), so we devide the difference by 86400 (seconds per day). . Finally we pipe "obase=2; DAYS-OLD" into bc to convert to binary. (obase == output base)

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

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

colored prompt
It colors the machine name and current directory different colors for easy viewing.

Git fetch all remote branches


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