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Play musical notes from octave of middle C
Are there any creative pieces of music that can be created using beep and the shell? I'd love to hear it!

Prevent non-root users from logging in
Also with optional message: $ echo "no login for you" > /etc/nologin (This doesn't affect your current X session - you're already logged in!)

Display IP : Count of failed login attempts
The lastb command presents you with the history of failed login attempts (stored in /var/log/btmp). The reference file is read/write by root only by default. This can be quite an exhaustive list with lots of bots hammering away at your machine. Sometimes it is more important to see the scale of things, or in this case the volume of failed logins tied to each source IP. The awk statement determines if the 3rd element is an IP address, and if so increments the running count of failed login attempts associated with it. When done it prints the IP and count. The sort statement sorts numerically (-n) by column 3 (-k 3), so you can see the most aggressive sources of login attempts. Note that the ':' character is the 2nd column, and that the -n and -k can be combined to -nk. Please be aware that the btmp file will contain every instance of a failed login unless explicitly rolled over. It should be safe to delete/archive this file after you've processed it.

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"

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Function to check whether a regular file ends with a newline
tail -c 1 "$1" returns the last byte in the file. Command substitution deletes any trailing newlines, so if the file ended in a newline $(tail -c 1 "$1") is now empty, and the -z test succeeds. However, $a will also be empty for an empty file, so we add -s "$1" to check that the file has a size greater than zero. Finally, -f "$1" checks that the file is a regular file -- not a directory or a socket, etc.

sorting file contents into individual files with awk
This command will sort the contents of FILENAME by redirecting the output to individual .txt files in which 3rd column will be used for sorting. If FILENAME contents are as follows: foo foo A foo bar bar B bar lorem ipsum A lorem Then two files called A.txt and B.txt will be created and their contents will be: A.txt foo foo A foo lorem ipsum A lorem and B.txt will be bar bar B bar

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Download all videos in your Boxee queue
Gets all videos in your boxee queue with a URL associated with them and attempts to download each using get_flash_videos

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously


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