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Stores the certificate expiration date on the variable A
Stores the certificate expiration date on the variable A

Use ImageMagick to get an image's properties

Remove a range of lines from a file

Obtain last stock quote from google API with xmlstarlet

Automatically find and re-attach to a detached screen session
man screen: "-D -R Attach here and now. In detail this means: If a session is running, then reattach. If necessary detach and logout remotely first. If it was not running create it and notify the user. This is the author?s favorite."

Redirect incoming traffic to SSH, from a port of your choosing
Stuck behind a restrictive firewall at work, but really jonesing to putty home to your linux box for some colossal cave? Goodness knows I was...but the firewall at work blocked all outbound connections except for ports 80 and 443. (Those were wide open for outbound connections.) So now I putty over port 443 and have my linux box redirect it to port 22 (the SSH port) before it routes it internally. So, my specific command would be: $iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 22 Note that I use -A to append this command to the end of the chain. You could replace that with -I to insert it at the beginning (or at a specific rulenum). My linux box is running slackware, with a kernel from circa 2001. Hopefully the mechanics of iptables haven't changed since then. The command is untested under any other distros or less outdated kernels. Of course, the command should be easy enough to adapt to whatever service on your linux box you're trying to reach by changing the numbers (and possibly changing tcp to udp, or whatever). Between putty and psftp, however, I'm good to go for hours of time-killing.

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"

put command in a loop to keep trying a connection
This will keep trying to reconnect your netcat connection can be used with SSH or Telnet, just substitute nc for ssh or telnet very useful for troubleshooting VPNs were you want to send continuous packets towards a destination to trace.

Generate a random left-hand password
Generates a random 8-character password that can be typed using only the left hand on a QWERTY keyboard. Useful to avoid taking your hand off of the mouse, especially if your username is left-handed. Change the 8 to your length of choice, add or remove characters from the list based on your preferences or kezboard layout, etc.

Gzip files older than 10 days matching *
Useful for a cron job that runs nightly, gzipping or alternatively deleting files from a specific directory that are older than 10 days (in this case)


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