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list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

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

Get file access control list

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Check the current price of Bitcoin in USD

Update dyndns.org with your external IP.
This is great if you are behind a router that does not support dynamic dns updates! Example: AT&T u-verse gateway... Put this in a script and run it as a cron job.

Uniquely (sort of) color text so you can see changes
Colorify colors input by converting the text to a number and then performing modulo 7 on it. This resulting number is used as the color escape code. This can be used to color the results of commands with complex outputs (like "482279054165371") so if any of the digits change, there's a good chance the color will change too. I say good chance because there's only 7 unique colors here, so assuming you were watching random numbers, there would be a 6/7 chance that the color would change when the number changed. This should really only be used to help quickly identify when things change, but should not be the only thing relied upon to positively assert that an output has not changed.

Show network throughput
Real gurus don't need fancy tools like iftop or jnettop.

Display a wave pattern
Purely frivolous - print a sine/cosine curve to the console - the width varies as it progresses. Ctrl-C to halt.

how to find the active X (X11/xorg) username and DISPLAY variable
Requires consolekit (works in e.g. Ubuntu). Here x11-display is DISPLAY


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