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Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Check ps output to see if file is running, if not start it
This comes in handy if you have daemons/programs that have potential issues and stop/disappear, etc., can be run in cron to ensure that a program remains up no matter what. Be advised though, if a program did core out, you'd likely want to know why (gdb) so use with caution on production machines.

Show when filesystem was created
Knowing when a filesystem is created , you can deduce when an operating system was installed . find filesystem device (/dev/) informations by using the cat /etc/fstab command.

list files recursively by size

Creates a symbolic link or overwrites an existing one
-n: dereference the existing link -v: (optional) to be sure of what is being done -f: force the deletion of the existing one -s: creates a symlink Be careful: the destination can also be a file or a directory and it will be overwritten.

Generate pretty secure random passwords
These are my favourite switches on pwgen: -B Don't include ambiguous characters in the password -n Include at least one number in the password -y Include at least one special symbol in the password -c Include at least one capital letter in the password It just works! Add a number to set password length, add another to set how many password to output. Example: pwgen -Bnyc 12 20 this will output 20 password of 12 chars length.

View any archive
Part of the "atool" package.

Save current layout of top
'top' has fancy layout modes where you can have several windows with different things displayed. You can configure a layout and then save it with 'W'. It will then be restored every time you run top. E.g. to have two colored windows, one sorted by CPU usage, the other by memory usage, run top $ top then press the keys $ and then as you don?t want to repeat this the next time: $

Hide the name of a process listed in the `ps` output
$ exec -a $NAME $COMMAND $ARGS `your_cmd -erase_all_files` is the real process, but harmless-looking getty appears in the process table. Never actually had a need to do this, but interesting nonetheless... Tested in bash, dash. $ -a $NAME "pass NAME as the zeroth argument to COMMAND", i.e. customise the name of the process (as commonly seen with `ps`)


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