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Find the fastest server to disable comcast's DNS hijacking
Comcast is an ISP in the United States that has started hijacking DNS requests as a "service" for its customers. For example, in Firefox, one used to be able to do a quick "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search by typing a single word into the URL field, assuming the word is not an existing domain when surrounded by www.*.com. Comcast customers never receive the correct NX (non-existent domain) error from DNS. Instead, they are shown a page full of advertising. There is a way to "opt out" from their service, but that requires having the account password and the MAC address of your modem handy. For me, it was easier just to set static DNS servers. But the problem is, which ones to choose? That's what this command answers. It'll show you the three _non-hijacked_ Comcast DNS servers that are the shortest distance away. Perhaps you don't have Comcast (lucky you!), but hopefully this command can serve as an example of using netselect to find the fastest server from a list. Note that, although this example doesn't show it, netselect will actually perform the uniq and DNS resolution for you. Requires: netselect, curl, sort, uniq, grep

List all TCP opened ports on localhost in LISTEN mode
Alternative of OJM snippet : This one show the IP too, where ports bind. It's very important, because if there's only 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0, connections from internet are rejected.

Bash alias to output the current Swatch Internet Time
Output the current time in Swatch “Internet Time”, aka .beats. There are 1000 .beats in a day, and @0 is at 00:00 Central European Standard Time. This was briefly a thing in the late 1990s. More details: https://2020.swatch.com/en_ca/internet-time/ The alias is rather quote heavy to protect the subshell, so the bare command is: $ echo '@'$(TZ=GMT-1 date +'(%-S + %-M * 60 + %-H * 3600) / 86.4'|bc)

Count files beneath current directory (including subfolders)

find all non-html files

replace strings in file names
Uses vi style search / replace in bash to rename files. Works with regex's too (I use the following a script to fixup / shorten file names): # Remove complete parenthetical/bracket/brace phrases rename 's/\(.*\)//g' * rename 's/\[.*\]//g' * rename 's/\{.*\}//g' *

Set file access control lists
The file myfile is owned by tom and has read and write permissions for tom. Group and other permissions are empty which make myfile readable and writable only by tom. setfacl enables user tom to give read permission to user john only. The command 'ls -l' shows a '+' sign telling us that file access control list has been setup for myfile.

Efficient remote forensic disk acquisition gpg-crypted for multiple recipients
Acquires a bit-by-bit data image, gzip-compresses it on multiple cores (pigz) and encrypts the data for multiple recipients (gpg -e -r). It finally sends it off to a remote machine.

recursive base64 encoding -- Cipher for the Poor ?
Just for fun, I searched a simple way to encrypt some text. Simple base64 encoding seemed a good start so I decided to "amplify" encoding using repeted base64 encoding. Of course, this is not really secure but can be useful to hide datas to most part of humans ;). Do not hesitate to provide better solutions or else.

Command to rename multiple file in one go
An entirely shell-based solution (should work on any bourne-style shell), more portable on relying on the rename command, the exact nature of which varies from distro to distro.


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