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Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Play all the music in a folder, on shuffle
Play files in shuffle mode with bash and mpg123. Why bother using big-as-hell stuff like mplayer? This will play all your music files contained in */* (in my case author/song.format) with bash and mplayer showing a nice output.

function to verify an IP address - can be used at the shell prompt or in a shell script
When processing IP addresses in the shell (or shell script) it is useful to be able to verify that the value of data is an IP address (an not some random string or non-sensible IP address).

lists files and folders in a folder
lists files and folders in a folder with summary.

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

generate random password
-B flag = don't include characters that can be confused for other characters (this helps when you give someone their password for the first time so they don't cause a lockout with, for example, denyhosts or fail2ban) -s flag = make a "secure", or hard-to-crack password -y flag = include special characters (not used in the example because so many people hate it -- however I recommend it) "1 10" = output 1 password, make it 10 characters in length For even more secure passwords please use the -y flag to include special characters like so: $ pwgen -Bsy 10 1 output>> }&^Y?.>7Wu

Find Duplicate Files (based on MD5 hash)
Calculates md5 sum of files. sort (required for uniq to work). uniq based on only the hash. use cut ro remove the hash from the result.

list files recursively by size

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"


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