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extract plain text from MS Word docx files
Tested on MacOS X

xargs for builtin bash commands
Similar to xargs -i, but works with builtin bash commands (rather than running "bash -c ..." through xargs)

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
This handles when you have a single call or channel. Other commands will strip out the result if there is a single channel or call active because the output changes the noun to be singular instead of plural.

Fast file backup
This is a BASH feature. The above command will create a backup of "filename" called "filename.DATE", where DATE is the actual day in %Y%m%d (year, month and day numbers together) format.

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password
4 random words are better than one obfuscated word http://xkcd.com/936/

Redirect incoming traffic to SSH, from a port of your choosing
Stuck behind a restrictive firewall at work, but really jonesing to putty home to your linux box for some colossal cave? Goodness knows I was...but the firewall at work blocked all outbound connections except for ports 80 and 443. (Those were wide open for outbound connections.) So now I putty over port 443 and have my linux box redirect it to port 22 (the SSH port) before it routes it internally. So, my specific command would be: $iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 22 Note that I use -A to append this command to the end of the chain. You could replace that with -I to insert it at the beginning (or at a specific rulenum). My linux box is running slackware, with a kernel from circa 2001. Hopefully the mechanics of iptables haven't changed since then. The command is untested under any other distros or less outdated kernels. Of course, the command should be easy enough to adapt to whatever service on your linux box you're trying to reach by changing the numbers (and possibly changing tcp to udp, or whatever). Between putty and psftp, however, I'm good to go for hours of time-killing.

Deleting / Ignoring lines from the top of a file

Random Number Between 1 And 256
It takes a byte from /dev/random whose source is the kernel entropy pool (better source than other solutions).

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

grab all commandlinefu shell functions into a single file, suitable for sourcing.
Much simpler but not as many features as the alternative.


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