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Copy without overwriting

clear screen, keep prompt at eye-level (faster than clear(1), tput cl, etc.)
this leaves the cursor at the bottom of the terminal screen, where your eyes are. ctrl-l moves it to the top, forcing you to look up.

runs a X session within your X session
http://www.debian-administration.org/article/Running_multiple_X11_sessions

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

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

See a full last history by expanding logrotated wtmp files
When your wtmp files are being logrotated, here's an easy way to unpack them all on the fly to see more than a week in the past. The rm is the primitive way to prevent symlink prediction attack.

Analyze, check, auto-repair and optimize Mysql Database
A useful way to do a full check and auto repair damaged databases

Scroll up (or Down (PgDn)) in any terminal session (except KDE)

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"

remove empty lines


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