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speedtest
alias speedtest='wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip'

The Chronic: run a command every N seconds in the background
Chronic Bash function: $ chronic 3600 time # Print the time in your shell every hour $ chronic 60 updatedb > /dev/null # update slocate every minute Note: use 'jobs' to list background tasks and fg/bg to take control of them.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Change timestamp on a file
-a for access time, -m for modification time, -c do not create any files, -t timestamp

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

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Lines per second in a log file
Another way of counting the line output of tail over 10s not requiring pv. Cut to have the average per second rate : tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 10; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2 You can also enclose it in a loop and send stderr to /dev/null : while true; do tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 2; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2; done 2>/dev/null

Default value or argument
I used it for this function, which prints hashes: function liner { num_lines=${1:-42} echo printf %${num_lines}s|tr " " "#" echo } Note the colon-dash, instead of the usual colon-equals.

Bash autocomplete case insensitive search
Change bash autocomplete case search to insensitive when pressing tab for completion.

Function to output an ASCII character given its decimal equivalent


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