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from the console, start a second X server
This starts a very basic X session, with just a simple xterm. You can use this xterm to launch your preferred distant session. $ ssh -X john@otherbox gnome-session Try also startkde or fluxbox or xfce4-session. To switch between your two X servers, use CTRL+ALT+F7 and CTRL+ALT+F8.

Securely destroy data on given device
Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

Edit a google doc with vim
Google just released a new commend line tool offering all sorts of new services from the commend line. One of them is uploading a youtube video but there are plenty more google services to interact with. Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ Manual: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/wiki/Manual This specific command courtesy of lifehacker:http://lifehacker.com/5568817/ Though all can be found in manual page linked above.

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

Null a file with sudo

Skip banner on ssh login prompt
This allows you to skip the banner (usually /etc/issue.net) on ssh connections. Useful to avoid banners outputted to your mail by rsync cronjobs.

pretend to be busy in office to enjoy a cup of coffee
just make some data scrolling off the terminal. wow.

Save all commands from commandlinefu.com to plain text sort by vote
Faster then other method using wget For obtain all commands use $nu=`curl http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse |grep -o "Terminal - All commands -.*results$" | grep -oE "[[:digit:],]{4,}" | sed 's/,//'`; $curl http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes/plaintext/[0-"$nu":25] | grep -vE "_curl_|\.com by David" > clf-ALL.txt For more version specific $nu=`curl http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse |grep -o "Terminal - All commands -.*results$" | grep -oE "[[:digit:],]{4,}" | sed 's/,//'`; $curl http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes/plaintext/[0-"$nu":25] | grep -vE "_curl_|\.com by David" > clf-ALL_"$nu".txt Also download dirctly from my dropbox My drop box invitaion link is http://db.tt/sRdJWvQq . Use it and get free 2.5 GB space.

easy C shell math calculators
allows simple C shell access to the power of bc - never could figure out how to do the same thing with Bash - that's why I use tcsh most of the time.

Move a folder and merge it with another folder
This will move a folder and merge it with another folder which may contain duplicates. Technically it's just creating hardlinks of everything in the folder, and after it's done, delete the source (with rm -r source/ ) to complete the move. This is much faster than, for example, using rsync to merge folders which would actually copy the entire contents and so for a lot of files would take much longer. This uses macutils gcp port of cp so it can be used on osx/MacOS. If using in linux or some unix where cp includes the ability to create links with -l you can just use cp instead of gcp.


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