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print/scan lines starting at record ###
Useful for finding newly added lines to a file, tail + can be used to show only the lines starting at some offset. A syslog scanner would look at the file for the first time, then record the end_of_file record number using wc -l. Later (hours, days), scan only at the lines that were added since the last scan.

Generate a random password 30 characters long
According to the gpg(1) manual: --gen-random 0|1|2 count Emit count random bytes of the given quality level 0, 1 or 2. If count is not given or zero, an endless sequence of random bytes will be emitted. If used with --armor the output will be base64 encoded. PLEASE, don't use this command unless you know what you are doing; it may remove precious entropy from the system! If your entropy pool is critical for various operations on your system, then using this command is not recommended to generate a secure password. With that said, regenerating entropy is as simple as: $ du -s / This is a quick way to generate a strong, base64 encoded, secure password of arbitrary length, using your entropy pool (example above shows a 30-character long password).

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.

Slightly better compressed archives
Avoids creating useless directory entries in archive, and sorts files by (roughly) extension, which is likely to group similar files together for better compression. 1%-5% improvement.

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

port forwarding
pem file used by AWS servers for additional security

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Alias to securely run X from tty and close that tty afterwards.
There are different ways to run X, I prefer to run it without xdm/gdm. The problem is you can't lock X because one can press Ctrl+Alt+F1, press Ctrl+Z and kill you X locking process. Of course you can disable Ctrl+Alt* or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace keys, but it's inconvinient if you really need to switch into console.

Create an easy to pronounce shortened URL from CLI
Just add this function to your .zshrc / .bashrc, and by typing "shout *URL*" you get a randomly chosen English word that ShoutKey.com uses to short your URL. You may now go to shoutkey.com/*output_word* and get redirected. The URL will be valid for 5 minutes. (I've never used sed before, so I'll be quite glad if someone could straighten up the sed commands and combine them (perhaps also removing the whitespace). If so, I'll update it right away ;) )

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