I use this as an alias:

alias authplain "printf '\!:1\0\!:1\0\!:2' | mmencode | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/^/AUTH PLAIN /'"

then..

# authplain [email protected] secretpassword

AUTH PLAIN c29tZXVzZXJAc29tZWRvbWFpbi5jb20Ac29tZXVzZXJAc29tZWRvbWFpbi5jb20Ac2VjcmV0cGFzc3dvcmQ=

#

Retrieve top ip threats from http://isc.sans.org/sources.html and add them into iptables output chain.

tired of switching to the console to check if some command has finished yet? if notify-send does not work on your box try this one... e.g. rsync -av -e /usr/bin/lsh $HOME slowconnection.bar:/mnt/backup ; z (now fire up X, do something useful, get notified if this stuff has finished).

When run on a mac, this command will bring up a dialog box in the Terminal when server HOSTNAME first responds to a ping.

This command starts screen with 'htop', 'nethogs' and 'iotop' in split-screen. You have to have these three commands (of course) and specify the interface for nethogs - mine is wlan0, I could have acquired the interface from the default route extending the command but this way is simpler.

htop is a wonderful top replacement with many interactive commands and configuration options. nethogs is a program which tells which processes are using the most bandwidth. iotop tells which processes are using the most I/O.

The command creates a temporary "screenrc" file which it uses for doing the triple-monitoring. You can see several examples of screenrc files here: http://www.softpanorama.org/Utilities/Screen/screenrc_examples.shtml

Get the name of the parent command. This might be helpful, if you need to react on that information. E. g. a script called directly via ssh has got sshd as parent, manually invoked the parent process will probably be bash

If you are doing some tests which require reboots (e. g. startup skripts, kernel module parameters, ...), this is very time intensive, if you have got a hardware with a long pre-boot phase due to hardware checks.

At this time, kexec can help, which only restarts the kernel with all related stuff.

First the kernel to be started is loaded, then kexec -e jumps up to start it.

Is as hard as a reboot -f, but several times faster (e. g. 1 Minute instead of 12 on some servers here).

Resizes all images in the curent directory to x resolution.

It is better than `mogrify -resize *.jpg` because of independence from extension of image (e.g. .jpg and .JPG) (:

If you know the benefits of screen, then this might come in handy for you. Instead of ssh'ing into a machine and then running a screen command, this can all be done on one line instead. Just have the person on the machine your ssh'ing into run something like

Then you would run

and be attached to the same screen session.

I wanted all the 'hidden' .flv files from the http link in the command line; wget seemed appropriate, fed with output from lynx, grep the flv files and the normalised via sed (to remove the numeric bullet). Similar to the 'Grab mp3 files' fu. Replace link with your own, grep arg with something more interesting ;) See here for something along the same lines...

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1006/grab-mp3-files-from-your-favorite-netcasts-mp3blog-or-sites-that-often-have-good-mp3s

Hope you find it useful! Improvements welcome, naturally.

Useful for analyzing disk usage. If you prefer GUI try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filelight or http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/

Useful if you f.i. want to block/allow all connections from a certain provider which uses successive netnames for his ip blocks. In this example I used the german Deutsche Telekom which has DTAG-DIAL followed by a number as netname for the dial in pools.

There are - as always ;) - different ways to do this. If you have seq available you can use

or without seq you can use bash brace expansion

or if you like while better than for use something like

and so on.

Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type.

Strangely enough, there is no option --lines=[negative] with tail, like the head's one, so we have to use sed, which is very short and clear, you see.

Strangely more enough, skipping lines at the bottom with sed is not short nor clear. From Sed one liner :

# delete the last 10 lines of a file

$ sed -e :a -e '$d;N;2,10ba' -e 'P;D' # method 1

$ sed -n -e :a -e '1,10!{P;N;D;};N;ba' # method 2

This starts a very basic X session, with just a simple xterm. You can use this xterm to launch your preferred distant session.

Try also startkde or fluxbox or xfce4-session.

To switch between your two X servers, use CTRL+ALT+F7 and CTRL+ALT+F8.

When you've got a list of numbers each on its row, the ECHO command puts them on a simple line, separated by space. You can then substitute the spaces with an operator. Finally, pipe it to the BC program.

I'm pretty sure everyone has curl and sed, but not everyone has lynx.

apt-get is pretty aggressive when it downloads, potentially hogging the bandwidth of your network. The 25 is in KB, change this to your needs.

Useful when you have some wrong on a server (nfs freeze/ immortal process)