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Watch the progress of 'dd'
Only slightly different than previous commands. The benefit is that your "watch" should die when the dd command has completed. (Of course this would depend on /proc being available)

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

See udev at work
See how your system works with pendrives/mice/monitors/whatever-you-can-plug-in. Use cases: see on which /dev/... your peripherals are, find out if a specific udev rule is being applied correctly.

Take a screenshot of a login screen
when using Gnome or KDE, you will have a hard time getting a screenshot of something like a login screen, or any other screen that occurs before the desktop environment is up and monitoring the printscreen key. (this probably applies for other DEs as well, but I haven't used them) What this command is meant to do is take a screenshot of an X window using a command you can run from your virtual terminals (actual text terminals, not just an emulator) To do this: Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to go to a virtual (text) terminal once your login window comes up Login to the virtual terminal and enter the command (you'll have to type it in) You should now have a file called screenshot.png in your home directory with your screenshot in it. For those of you who are new to the virtual terminal thing, you can use CTRL+ALT+F7 to get back to your regular GUI From http://www.gnome.org

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

swap the java version being used
You have openjdk and sun java installed. Many of your java plugins will not work properly. Something called IcedTea (the java web plugin) keeps crashing. Run this and select sun java to use sun java.

Unaccent an entire directory tree with files.
This command changes all filename and directories within a directory tree to unaccented ones. I had to do this to 'sanitize' some samba-exported trees. The reason it works might seem a little difficult to see at first - it first reverses-sort by pathname length, then it renames only the basename of the path. This way it'll always go in the right order to rename everything. Some notes: 1. You'll have to have the 'unaccent' command. On Ubuntu, just aptitude install unaccent. 2. In this case, the encoding of the tree was UTF-8 - but you might be using another one, just adjust the command to your encoding. 3. The program might spit a few harmless errors saying the files are the same - not to fear.

converting horizontal line to vertical line

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

find the rpm package name that provides a specific file
For Linux distributions using rpm (eg Mandriva), this command will find the rpm package name that provides a file.


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