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Get all IPs via ifconfig
The initial version of this command also outputted extra empty lines, so it went like this: 192.168.166.48 127.0.0.1 This happened on Ubuntu, i haven't tested on anything else.

Query ip pools based on successive netnames via whois
Useful if you f.i. want to block/allow all connections from a certain provider which uses successive netnames for his ip blocks. In this example I used the german Deutsche Telekom which has DTAG-DIAL followed by a number as netname for the dial in pools. There are - as always ;) - different ways to do this. If you have seq available you can use $ net=DTAG-DIAL ; for i in `seq 1 30`; do whois -h whois.ripe.net $net$i | grep '^inetnum:' | sed "s;^.*:;$net$i;" ; done or without seq you can use bash brace expansion $ net=DTAG-DIAL ; for i in {1..30}; do whois -h whois.ripe.net $net$i | grep '^inetnum:' | sed "s;^.*:;$net$i;" ; done or if you like while better than for use something like $ net=DTAG-DIAL ; i=1 ; while true ; do whois -h whois.ripe.net $net$i | grep '^inetnum:' | sed "s;^.*:;$net$i;" ; test $i = 30 && break ; i=$(expr $i + 1) ; done and so on.

generate random mac address

Go (cd) directly into a new temp folder
This command create a new temp directory using mktemp (to avoid collisions) and change the current working directory to the created directory.

get a random 0/1, use it for on/off, yes/no
use it to add a random boolean switch to your script

TCP and UDP listening sockets
This command show listening sockets TCP and UDP. Useful for stop unwanted services from linux.

cd into another dir to run a one-liner, but implicitly drop back to your $OLD_PWD after
Obviously the example given is necessarily simple, but this command not only saves time on the command line (saves you using "cd -" or, worse, having to type a fully qualified path if your command cd's more than once), but is vital in scripts, where I've found the behaviour of "cd -" to be a little broken at times.

Serial console to a Vmware VM
Create a serial console with "socket (named pipe)" of "/tmp/socket", "from:server, to:virtual machine" in vmware player, etc.. gui. Run the above command after you have booted the guest OS (which should also be configured for serial console).

Show numerical values for each of the 256 colors in bash
Same as http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/5876, but for bash. This will show a numerical value for each of the 256 colors in bash. Everything in the command is a bash builtin, so it should run on any platform where bash is installed. Prints one color per line. If someone is interested in formatting the output, paste the alternative.

random xkcd comic as xml


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