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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

Infinite loop ssh

See why a program can't seem to access a file
Sometimes a program refuses to read a file and you're not sure why. You may have display_errors turned off for PHP or something. In this example, fopen('/var/www/test/foo.txt') was called but doesn't have read access to foo.txt. Strace can tell you what went wrong. E.g., if php doesn't have read access to the file, strace will say "EACCESS (Permission denied)". Or, if the file path you gave doesn't exist, strace will say "ENOENT (No such file or directory)", etc. This works for any program you can run from the command-line, e.g., strace python myapp.py -e open,access... Note: the above command uses php-cli, not mod_php, which is a different SAPI with diff configs, etc.

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

for all who don't have the watch command

Deal with dot files safely

Encode/Decode text to/from Base64 on a Mac w/out Mac Ports
I have a mac, and do not want to install mac ports to get the base64 binary. Using openssl will do the trick just fine. Note, to decode base64, specify a '-d' after 'base64' in the command. Note also the files base64.decoded.txt and base64.encoded.txt are text files.

pipe output to notify-send
Route output to notify-send to show nice messages on the desktop, e.g. title and interpreter of the current radio stream

Find files containing string and open in vim
I often use "vim -p" to open in tabs rather than buffers.


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