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Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Extract tarball from internet without local saving

Day of the week of your birthday over the years.
Do you ever want to know which day of week was your birhday! Now you can check that with this command, just set your birh date at the beginning (My bday in the example) and the dates will be revealed. ;)

Update your journal
prerequisite: $ mkdir ~/journal

Ask user to confirm
Returns true if user presses the key. Use it like $ Confirm "Continue" && do action

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

Generate a random password 30 characters long
This command is similar to the alternate, except with head(1), you can pick as many passwords as you wish to generate by changing the number of lines you wish to preview.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

create random string from /dev/urandom (or another length)

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.


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