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Alias TAIL for automatic smart output
Run the alias command, then issue $ps aux | tail and resize your terminal window (putty/console/hyperterm/xterm/etc) then issue the same command and you'll understand. $ ${LINES:-`tput lines 2>/dev/null||echo -n 12`} Insructs the shell that if LINES is not set or null to use the output from `tput lines` ( ncurses based terminal access ) to get the number of lines in your terminal. But furthermore, in case that doesn't work either, it will default to using the default of 80. The default for TAIL is to output the last 10 lines, this alias changes the default to output the last x lines instead, where x is the number of lines currently displayed on your terminal - 7. The -7 is there so that the top line displayed is the command you ran that used TAIL, ie the prompt. Depending on whether your PS1 and/or PROMPT_COMMAND output more than 1 line (mine is 3) you will want to increase from -2. So with my prompt being the following, I need -7, or - 5 if I only want to display the commandline at the top. ( http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash-power-prompt.html ) 275MB/748MB [7995:7993 - 0:186] 06:26:49 Thu Apr 08 [askapache@n1-backbone5:/dev/pts/0 +1] ~ $ In most shells the LINES variable is created automatically at login and updated when the terminal is resized (28 linux, 23/20 others for SIGWINCH) to contain the number of vertical lines that can fit in your terminal window. Because the alias doesn't hard-code the current LINES but relys on the $LINES variable, this is a dynamic alias that will always work on a tty device.

Add temporary entry to authorized_keys
If you frequently need to connect to your ubersecure mainframe from various uberunsafe machines, you have to face difficult decision: (a) type the password everytime during the session (lame), (b) add local public key to mainframes authorized_keys file (unsafe), (c) as above, but remove this key at the end of the session (pain in the a55). So let's say you save The Command to tempauth file in bin directory of your mainframe's account and make it executable. Then, while you're on one of these unsafe ones, do: $ cat $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub|ssh 5z474n@mainframe.nl bin/tempauth 30 and password prompts stop the harassment for 30 minutes and you don't have to care to remove the unsafe key after that.

Execute a command with a timeout

Random quote from Borat -- no html parsing
Turns out smacie.com has a text file containing every single one of the borat quotes, each one on a newline. This makes it very convenient, as this can be done without any sed-parsing, and uses less bandwitdth! Note that borate quotes are quite offensive, much more so than "fortunes-off"!

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

Search commandlinefu.com from the command line using the API
just like the original - just colored and with less

Count the number of characters in each line

Colorize svn stat
Use color escape sequences and sed to colorize the output of svn stat -u. Colors: http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/colorizing.html svn stat characters: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn-book.html#svn.ref.svn.c.status GNU Extensions for Escapes in Regular Expressions: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Escapes.html

Generate a random password 30 characters long
According to the gpg(1) manual: --gen-random 0|1|2 count Emit count random bytes of the given quality level 0, 1 or 2. If count is not given or zero, an endless sequence of random bytes will be emitted. If used with --armor the output will be base64 encoded. PLEASE, don't use this command unless you know what you are doing; it may remove precious entropy from the system! If your entropy pool is critical for various operations on your system, then using this command is not recommended to generate a secure password. With that said, regenerating entropy is as simple as: $ du -s / This is a quick way to generate a strong, base64 encoded, secure password of arbitrary length, using your entropy pool (example above shows a 30-character long password).

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS
Shorter version, works with multiple words.


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