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A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

Run a bash script in debug mode, show output and save it on a file
Sends both stdout and stderr to the pipe which captures the data in the file 'out.test' and sends to stdout of tee (likely /dev/tty unless redirected). Works on Bourne, Korn and Bash shells.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Simplest port scanner
Very handy way to perform a host scan if you don't have nmap,ncat,nc ...or other tools installed locally. When executing a command on a /dev/tcp/$host/$port pseudo-device file, Bash opens a TCP connection to the associated socket and UDP connection when using /dev/udp/$host/$port.A simlpe way to get servers banner is to run this command "cat < /dev/tcp/localhost/25" , here you will get mail server's banner. NOTE: Bash, as packaged for Debian, does not support using the /dev/tcp and /dev/udp pseudo-device it's not enabled by default Because bash in Debian is compiled with ?disable-net-redirections.

Mount a VMware virtual disk (.vmdk) file on a Linux box
This does not require you to know the partition offset, kpartx will find all partitions in the image and create loopback devices for them automatically. This works for all types of images (dd of hard drives, img, etc) not just vmkd. You can also activate LVM volumes in the image by running $vgchange -a y and then you can mount the LV inside the image. To unmount the image, umount the partition/LV, deactivate the VG for the image $vgchange -a n then run $kpartx -dv to remove the partition mappings.

Play ISO/DVD-files and activate dvd-menu and mouse menu clicks.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

convert unixtime to human-readable

backup local MySQL database into a folder and removes older then 5 days backups

Generate pretty secure random passwords
These are my favourite switches on pwgen: -B Don't include ambiguous characters in the password -n Include at least one number in the password -y Include at least one special symbol in the password -c Include at least one capital letter in the password It just works! Add a number to set password length, add another to set how many password to output. Example: pwgen -Bnyc 12 20 this will output 20 password of 12 chars length.


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