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Find out the active XOrg Server DISPLAY number (from outside)
It's useful when you cannot access your env (systemd) or the process DISPLAY variable is not set. Perhaps also when you have a multi-head/user configuration.

Getting Screen's Copy Buffer Into X's Copy Buffer (on Linux)
This command will let you just type c-a b (which means press 'ctrl' then 'a' then 'b'), and screen will save your copy buffer to /tmp/screen-exchange, and then execute xsel to copy the contents of that file into the system's X clipboard. 1. Install Conrad Parker's xsel from http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/software/xsel/ 2. Add these lines to your .screenrc # Add cool line to make copying to x clipboard possible. # This binds C-a b to copy screen's copy buffer to the system clipboard. bind b eval writebuf 'exec /bin/sh -c "xsel -i -b < /tmp/screen-exchange"' 'exec /bin/sh -c "killall xsel"' 3. Restart screen. 4. Test it by typing c-a [ to enter copy mode. 5. Select some text using vi movement keys (h, j, k, l, etc...) and starting your selection by hitting the space bar, moving with vi movement keys, and then ending your selection with the space bar. 6. Type C-a b, and screen will use xsel to copy your screen copy buffer to the system's X clipboard buffer. 7. Then you can paste the screen copy buffer into any X program. Note: If you're using Mac OSX, you can use pbcopy instead of xsel. Also Note: The second exec in the .screenrc file, which runs killall on xsel, is necessary, because even when you redirect a file to xsel, xsel waits for you to press ctrl-c to kill it, and have it stop waiting for more input. Since xsel forces screen to wait, and I don't want to press ctrl-c, I send the equivalent of ctrl-c with killall causing xsel to write /tmp/screen-exchange to the X clipboard, and then exit. It's a hack, but it works. If you know how to get this to work without a lame hack leave a comment explaining how.

Get a MySQL DB dump from a remote machine
This command will dump a database on a remote stream to stdout, compress it, stream it to your local machine, decompress it and put it into a file called database.sql.You could even pipe it into mysql on your local machine to restore it immediately. I had to use this recently because the server I needed a backup from didn't have enough disk space.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

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

Mac OS-X-> copy and paste things to and from the clipboard from the shell
Copies whatever is piped to the pbcopy command to the clipboard. pbpaste ... well pastes whats on the clipboard.

Find broken symlinks
To understand why this is the equivalent of "find -L /path/to/search -type l, see http://ynform.org/w/Pub/FindBrokenSymbolicLinks or look at http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html

Record live sound in Vorbis (eg for bootlegs or to take audio notes)
This will record the capture channel of your soundcard, directly encoded in Ogg Vorbis, in stereo at quality 5 (I'm using this to record live jam sessions from my line input). You can choose which device to capture (eg. line input, microphone or PCM output) with $ alsamixer -V capture You can do the same thing and live encode in MP3 or FLAC if you wish, just check FLAC and LAME man pages.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

a find and replace within text-based files
using find's exec option instead of a for loop and using sed's -i option for inplace replacement. no need to do the file swap.


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