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Mount the first NTFS partition inside a VDI file (VirtualBox Disk Image)
Found at: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=52

Remove all hidden files in a directory
Remove all hidden files in a directory excluding current dir . and parent dir .. with .??* that means files with at least two characters.

(Git) Revert files with changed mode, not content
I sometimes (due to mismanagement!) end up with files in a git repo which have had their modes changed, but not their content. This one-liner lets me revert the mode changes, while leaving changed-content files be, so I can commit just the actual changes made.

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

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

Edit a file in vim (at the first error) if it is not well formed xml.
Validate a file using xmllint. If there are parser errors, edit the file in vim at the line of the first error.

calulate established tcp connection of local machine
If you want prepend/append text just wrap in echo: $echo Connected: `netstat -an|grep -ci "tcp.*established"`

Protect directory from an overzealous rm -rf *
Forces the -i flag on the rm command when using a wildcard delete.

Test network speed without wasting disk
The above command will send 4GB of data from one host to the next over the network, without consuming any unnecessary disk on either the client nor the host. This is a quick and dirty way to benchmark network speed without wasting any time or disk space. Of course, change the byte size and count as necessary. This command also doesn't rely on any extra 3rd party utilities, as dd, ssh, cat, /dev/zero and /dev/null are installed on all major Unix-like operating systems.

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.


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