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Makefile argument passing
This would allow reference of $(VAR) (if defined) with the value 'foobar' within the Makefile.

run a VirtualBox virtual machine without a gui
you can launch a VirtualBox VM from the command line using VBoxManage, but that invokes it in a gui environment. If you want to just fire off your VM in the background, use VBoxHeadless as shown. To get the names and UUIDs of your VirtualBox VMs, type: $ VBoxManage list

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

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"

Rename files in batch

kill all foo process
Kill all processes with foo in them. Similar to pkill but more complete and also works when there is no pkill command. Works on almost every Linux/Unix platform I have tried.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

grep expression (perl regex) to extract all ip addresses from both ip and ifconfig commands output
It uses the following GNU grep options: "-o" which shows only the matching part of the line and "-P" which allows the use of Perl regular expressions.

Convert one file from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
Nothing fancy it just converts one file from one character encoding into another one.

wget multiple files (or mirror) from NTLM-protected Sharepoint
If you have to deal with MS Sharepoint which is (rarely, let's hope) used in e.g. certain corporate environments). This uses Cntlm. For single files, just use cURL -- its NTLM authentication works quite well. # /etc/cntlm.conf: # Username account # Domain domain # Password ############ # Proxy 10.20.30.40 (IP of the sharepoint site) # NoProxy * # Listen 3128


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