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Force machine to reboot no matter what (even if /sbin/shutdown is hanging)
This will cause your machine to INSTANTLY reboot. No un-mounting of drives or anything. Very handy when something has gone horribly wrong with your server in that co-location facility miles away with no remote hands! Suspect this works with all 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels compiled with magic-syskey-request support.

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

open path with your default program (on Linux/*BSD)
open [path] in the default program, regardless of which Desktop Environment you use (KDE, GNOME, etc.) Works on all "freedesktop.org" compatible desktop environments

Working random fact generator
Though without infinite time and knowledge of how the site will be designed in the future this may stop working, it still will serve as a simple straight forward starting point. This uses the observation that the only item marked as strong on the page is the single logical line that includes the italicized fact. If future revisions of the page show failure, or intermittent failure, one may simply alter the above to read. $ wget randomfunfacts.com -O - 2>/dev/null | tee lastfact | grep \ | sed "s;^.*\(.*\).*$;\1;" The file lastfact, can then be examined whenever the command fails.

show rpm packages scriptlets

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

Debug SSH at the Maximum Verbosity Level
When debugging an ssh connection either to optimize your settings ie compression, ciphers, or more commonly for debugging an issue connecting, this alias comes in real handy as it's not easy to remember the '-o LogLevel=DEBUG3' argument, which adds a boost of debugging info not available with -vvv alone. Especially useful are the FD info, and the setup negotiation to create a cleaner, faster connection.

get the oldest file in a directory
reverse the sorting of ls to get the newest file: $ls -1tr --group-directories-first /path/to/dir/ | tail -n 1 Problems: If there are no files in the directory you will get a directory or nothing.

diff 2 remote files

Disco lights in the terminal
Looks best in an 80x24 256-color terminal emulator.


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