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Connect to TCP port 5000, transfer data and close connexion.
With no '-q 0' switch, nc simply waits, and whatever awaits the data hangs.

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"

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS

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

ssh autocomplete
Add to your bash profile to minimize carpal tunnel syndrome. Doesn't work with user@hostname but appending "-l user" works fine if needed. Works for ping as well.. complete -W "$(echo `cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sed -e s/,.*//g | uniq | grep -v "\["`;)" ping

Split a tarball into multiple parts
Create a tar file in multiple parts if it's to large for a single disk, your filesystem, etc. Rejoin later with `cat .tar.*|tar xf -`

Simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data
Sometimes you need a simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data. Example: Consider you want to know, which data is posted by a homepage to a remote script without analysing the html code! A simple way to do this is to save the page to your computer, substitude all action="address" with action="localhost:portnumber", run 'ncat -l portnumber' and open the edited page with your browser. If you then submit the form, ncat will print out the http-protocol with all the posted data.

Find the package that installed a command

output length of longest line
If your wc does not have the -L option, you can use awk.

print the name of each package APT knows [matching a prefix]
In this case, linux- is the prefix; simply running $apt-cache pkgnames would list every package APT knows about. The default APT config assumes -g, --generate; to use the cache as/is, you could similarly run: $apt-cache --no-generate pkgnames [prefix] Adding --all-names, like so: $apt-cache --no-generate --all-names pkgnames [prefix] would print all the packages APT knows about, using the cache as/is, including virtual packages and missing dependencies. This command was shamelessly stolen from the apt-cache(8) man-page.


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