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Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

Find broken symlinks

wrap long lines of a text
wraps text lines at the specified width (90 here). -s option is to force to wrap on blank characters -b count bytes instead of columns

Delicious search with human readable output
You can install filterous with $ sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev; sudo easy_install -U filterous

Edit the list of to ignore files in the active directory
Standard command, but I always have to search for it... ;-)

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

Recursive replace of directory and file names in the current directory.
no grep, no perl, no pipe. even better in zsh/bash4: $ for i in **/*oldname*; do "mv $i ${i/oldname/newname/}"; done No find, no grep, no perl, no pipe

Display the standard deviation of a column of numbers with awk

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.


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