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Determine if a port is open with bash
For times when netcat isn't available. Will throw a Connection refused message if a port is closed. Scriptable: $ (: /dev/null && echo "OPEN" || echo "CLOSED"

Google Translate
Usage: $ translate Example: $ translate hello en es See this for a list of language codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes

a short counter
Maybe you know shorter ?

copy working directory and compress it on-the-fly while showing progress
What happens here is we tell tar to create "-c" an archive of all files in current dir "." (recursively) and output the data to stdout "-f -". Next we specify the size "-s" to pv of all files in current dir. The "du -sb . | awk ?{print $1}?" returns number of bytes in current dir, and it gets fed as "-s" parameter to pv. Next we gzip the whole content and output the result to out.tgz file. This way "pv" knows how much data is still left to be processed and shows us that it will take yet another 4 mins 49 secs to finish. Credit: Peteris Krumins http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

convert a web page into a pdf
This uses the "command-line print" plugin for Firefox (http://torisugari.googlepages.com/commandlineprint2). This same plugin can also produce PNGs. On *nix, the file must exist; therefore the touch bit in front. Also, firefox seems to ignore saved user preferences when "printing" this way (margins, header, footer, etc.), so I had to tweak my ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/prefs.js file by hand. Yup, that's *prefs.js* not user.js - apparently, firefox ignores my user.js file too...

shell function which allows you to tag files by creating symbolic links directories in a 'tags' folder.
The tag function takes a tag name as its first argument, then a list of files which take that tag. The directory $HOME/tags/tagname will then hold symbolic links to each of the tagged files. This function was inspired by tmsu (found at https://bitbucket.org/oniony/tmsu/wiki/Home). Example: $ tag dog airedale.txt .shizturc weimeraner.pl This will create $HOME/tags/dog which contains symbolic links to airedale.txt .shizturc and weimeraner.pl

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

Create an ISO Image from a folder and burn it to CD
Create an ISO Image from a folder and burn it to CD (Os X)

View acceptable client certificate CA names asked for during SSL renegotiations
The key is to use the -prexit option at the command line, and then type "quit" instead of CTRL-C to exit OpenSSL. OpenSSL will then dump its last negotiated state, printing out the contents of the renegotiated handshake. Crucial for debugging client certificate configurations on web servers such as IIS, which renegotiate the SSL/TLS connection with the HTTP request in-flight to ask the client for a cert.

Print sensors data for your hardware


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