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Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

Eavesdrop on your system
This command takes a snapshot of the open files for a PID 1234 then waits 10 seconds and takes another snapshot of the same PID, it then displays the difference between each snapshot to give you an insight into what the application is doing.

Pronounce an English word using Merriam-Webster.com
The original was a little bit too complicated for me. This one does not use any variables.

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"

Change timestamp on a file
-a for access time, -m for modification time, -c do not create any files, -t timestamp

Display duplicated lines in a file
Displays the duplicated lines in a file and their occuring frequency.

Check the status of a network interface

Alternative for basename using grep to extract file name
Here's a bash version.

Extract shortcuts and hostnames from .ssh/config
Spits out table that shows your Host->HostName aliases in ~/.ssh/config

split a multi-page PDF into separate files
Have to do this once per output file, because if device is 'pdfwrite', even if 'gs' sees '%d' in the OutputFile it still only creates one single output file. Embed it into a simple shell script if you want to split a document out into one file for every page.


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