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Run remote web page, but don't save the results
I have a remote php file that I want to run once an hour. I set up cron to run this wget. I don't really care about what's in the file though, I don't want to save the results, so I run the -O and send it to /dev/null

Find the package that installed a command

Connect-back shell using Bash built-ins
Connect-back shell using Bash built-ins. Useful in a web app penetration test, if it's the case of a locked down environment, without the need for file uploads or a writable directory. -- /dev/tcp and /dev/udb redirects must be enabled at compile time in Bash. Most Linux distros enable this feature by default but at least Debian is known to disable it. -- http://labs.neohapsis.com/2008/04/17/connect-back-shell-literally/

Second pass dvd rip... The set of commands was too long, so I had to separate them into two.
This set of commands will rip a dvd title using a 2 pass mencoder xvid encode. It will provide a great quality rip. It will rip as close to 700MB as possible. (note the bitrate of -700000) Enjoy!

GREP a PDF file.
PDF files are simultaneously wonderful and heinous. They are wonderful in being ubiquitous and mostly being cross platform. They are heinous in being very difficult to work with from the command line, search, grep, use only the text inside the PDF, or use outside of proprietary products. xpdf is a wonderful set of PDF tools. It is on many linux distros and can be installed on OS X. While primarily an open PDF viewer for X, xpdf has the tool "pdftotext" that can extract formated or unformatted text from inside a PDF that has text. This text stream can then be further processed by grep or other tool. The '-' after the file name directs output to stdout rather than to a text file the same name as the PDF. Make sure you use version 3.02 of pdftotext or later; earlier versions clipped lines. The lines extracted from a PDF without the "-layout" option are very long. More paragraphs. Use just to test that a pattern exists in the file. With "-layout" the output resembles the lines, but it is not perfect. xpdf is available open source at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

generate random mac-address using md5sum + sed

Rename files in batch

tee to a file descriptor
the tee command does fine with file names, but not so much with file descriptors, such as &2 (stderr). This uses process redirection to tee to the specified descriptor. In the sample output, it's being used to tee to stderr, which is connected with the terminal, and to wc -l, which is also outputting to the terminal. The result is the output of bash --version followed by the linecount

Get a list of Mageia Linux mirrors providing rsync connectivity for Mageia 4 release
Need to find a Mageia Linux mirror server providing Mageia 4 via rsync? Modify the "url=" string for the version you want. This shows i586 which is the 32bit version. If you want the 64bit version it is: url=http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.4.x86_64.list; wget -q ${url} -O - | grep rsync:

Bash alias to output the current Swatch Internet Time
Output the current time in Swatch “Internet Time”, aka .beats. There are 1000 .beats in a day, and @0 is at 00:00 Central European Standard Time. This was briefly a thing in the late 1990s. More details: https://2020.swatch.com/en_ca/internet-time/ The alias is rather quote heavy to protect the subshell, so the bare command is: $ echo '@'$(TZ=GMT-1 date +'(%-S + %-M * 60 + %-H * 3600) / 86.4'|bc)


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