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Encrypted archive with openssl and tar
command to decrypt: $ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d < secret.tar.enc | tar x Of course, don't forget to rm the original files ;) You may also want to look at the openssl docs for more options.

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

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.

Determine what version of bind is running on a dns server.
Due to the recent dynamic update vulnerability with bind, I was forced to dig a little deeper into dig...

copy working directory and compress it on-the-fly while showing progress
What happens here is we tell tar to create "-c" an archive of all files in current dir "." (recursively) and output the data to stdout "-f -". Next we specify the size "-s" to pv of all files in current dir. The "du -sb . | awk ?{print $1}?" returns number of bytes in current dir, and it gets fed as "-s" parameter to pv. Next we gzip the whole content and output the result to out.tgz file. This way "pv" knows how much data is still left to be processed and shows us that it will take yet another 4 mins 49 secs to finish. Credit: Peteris Krumins http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

backup local MySQL database into a folder and removes older then 5 days backups

Chmod all directories (excluding files)
+ at the end means that many filenames will be passed to every chmod call, thus making it faster. And find own {} makes sure that it will work with spaces and other characters in filenames.

Renaming a file without overwiting an existing file name
Sometimes in a hurry you may move or copy a file using an already existent file name. If you aliased the cp and mv command with the -i option you are prompted for a confirmation before overwriting but if your aliases aren't there you will loose the target file! The -b option will force the mv command to check if the destination file already exists and if it is already there a backup copy with an ending ~ is created.

Every Nth line position # (AWK)
A better way to show the file lines 3n + 1

directly ssh to host B that is only accessible through host A
Of course you need to be able to access host A for this ;-)


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