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To print a specific line from a file
Just one character longer than the sed version ('FNR==5' versus -n 5p). On my system, without using "exit" or "q", the awk version is over four times faster on a ~900K file using the following timing comparison: $ testfile="testfile"; for cmd in "awk 'FNR==20'" "sed -n '20p'"; do echo; echo $cmd; eval "$cmd $testfile"; for i in {1..3}; do time for j in {1..100}; do eval "$cmd $testfile" >/dev/null; done; done; done Adding "exit" or "q" made the difference between awk and sed negligible and produced a four-fold improvement over the awk timing without the "exit". For long files, an exit can speed things up: $ awk 'FNR==5{print;exit}'

Find the package that installed a command

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

Print line immediately before a matching regex.
Use this if you don't have access to GNU grep's -B option.

add all files not under version control to repository
With the force options the same results can be achieved

Display time of accounts connection on a system
Works on CentOS ad OpenBSD too, display time of accounts connection on a system, -p option print individual user's statistics.

Create a backdoor on a machine to allow remote connection to bash
My netcat (nc-1.84-10.fc6) doesn't have the -e option, so I have to do it like this. Of course, instead of bash, you can use any executable, including scripts.

reduce mp3 bitrate (and size, of course)
Useful if you have to put some mp3 files into mobile devices (ie mobile phones with no much memory)

en/decrypts files in a specific directory
To decrypt the files replace "ccenrypt" with "ccdecrypt. ccrypt(1) must be installed. It uses the AES (Rijndael) block cipher. To make it handier create an alias.

Reload all sysctl variables without reboot
Reload all defined kernel variables from /etc/sysctl.conf(if no parameter after -p is given) without the old myth "Ah, you'll need to reboot to apply those variables"...


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