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Spell check the text in clipboard (paste the corrected clipboard if you like)
xclip -o > /tmp/spell.tmp # Copy clipboard contents to a temp file aspell check /tmp/spell.tmp # Run aspell on that file cat /tmp/spell.tmp | xclip # Copy the results back to the clipboard, so that you can paste the corrected text I'm not sure xclip is installed in most distributions. If not, you can install x11-apps package

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

True Random Dice Roll
/dev/urandom is cryptographically secure, and indistinguishable from true random, as it gathers data from external sources, influenced by human timing interactions with computers, to fill the entropy pool, and hashes the input with SHA-1. As such, this is a quick way to do a "true random" fair-6 dice roll. Using this method, you could easily create passphrases with Diceware http://diceware.com. Change the head(1) count to something other than 5 for more or less numbers.

Detect if we are running on a VMware virtual machine
If you run this command on a VMWare Virtual Machine, it will return the string "VMware Virtual Platform". If you run it on a physical machine, it will return nothing. Useful for having a script determine if it's running on a VM or not. Of course, you must have dmidecode installed for this to work. Try it this way in a script: ISVM=$(dmidecode | awk '/VMware Virtual Platform/ {print $3,$4,$5}') Then test if $ISVM has text in it, or is blank.

Ask for a password, the passwd-style
You can ask repeatedly for a non-blank password using this function: function read_password() { while [ ! -n "$USER_PASSWORD" ]; do read -s -p"Password: " USER_PASSWORD if [ ! -n "$USER_PASSWORD" ]; then echo "ERROR: You must specify a valid password, please try again" fi echo done } Also you can set a time out (in seconds) to write the password read -t 10 -s -p"Password: " USER_PASSWORD_VARIABLE if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "Time out!" fi

create directory and set owner/group/mode in one shot

exclude file(s) from rsync
rsyncs files to a server excluding listed files also a file can be used to exclude common exclude rules and/or to exclude a ton of files, like so: $rsync --exclude-from '~/.scripts/exclude.txt' where exclude.txt has one rule per line: *.mp3 *.svn*

Use tcpdump to monitor all DNS queries and responses

Oneliner to get domain names list of all existing domain names (from wikipedia)
Quietly get a webpage from wikipedia: curl -s By default, don't output anything: sed -n Search for interesting lines: /<tr valign="top">/ With the matching lines: {} Search and replace any html tags: s/<[^>]*>//g Finally print the result: p


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