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Create a simple video contact sheet using the vcs bash script
Assumes you've downloaded Toni Corvera's vcs script (http://p.outlyer.net/vcs), have it in your PATH, and have installed the script's dependencies. Generates a video contact sheet of 24 thumbnails and 3 thumbnails per column. The bold font and white-on-black color scheme keeps the text readable at the chosen 70% JPEG compression quality, which keeps the file size at a manageable level. You can go even lower with the quality and get a good looking result.

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

Calculate pi to an arbitrary number of decimal places
Change the scale to adjust number of decimal places prefix the command with "time" to benchmark the computer (compare how long it takes to calculate 10000 digits of pi on various computers).

Print nic name of current connection

Show all LISTENing and open server connections, with port number and process name/pid

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Send keypresses to an X application
This is a (last resort) way to automate applications that provide no other ways for automation, it would send 'Hello world' to the currently active window. See the manpage (and the -text and -window entries) for how to send special characters and target specific windows. An example: Using xwininfo, I get the id of my XPlanet background window: alanceil@kvirasim:19:51:0:~> xwininfo xwininfo: Please select the window about which you would like information by clicking the mouse in that window. xwininfo: Window id: 0x3600001 "Xplanet 1.2.0" Absolute upper-left X: 0 (..etc..) Now I use xvkbd to tell it to close itself: xvkbd -xsendevent -window 0x3600001 -text "Q" Obviously, the best way is to put these commands in a shellscript - just make sure to include a short sleep (sleep .1 should suffice) after each xvkbd call, or some programs will become confused.

Follow the flow of a log file
tailf same as tail -f follow the flow of a log file, showing it in real time to stdout.

Convert control codes to visible Unicode Control Pictures
Converts control codes and spaces (ASCII code ≤ 32) to visible Unicode Control Pictures, U+2400 ? U+2420. Skips \n characters, which is probably a good thing.

Convert text to uppercase
Usage: upper [STRING]...


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