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Monitor a file with tail with timestamps added

Print a cron formatted time for 2 minutes in the future (for crontab testing)
Another function to stick into your .bashrc This spits out the time two minutes in the future, but already formatted for pasting into your crontab file for testing without any thought required on your part. Frequently things don't work the way you expect inside a crontab job, and you probably want to find out now that your $PATH is completely different inside of cron or other global variables aren't defined. So this will generate a date you can use for testing now, and then later you can change it to run at 5:37 am on a Sunday evening.

Download all images from a 4chan thread
Useful for ripping wallpaper from 4chan.org/wg

search for files or directories, then show a sorted list of just the unique directories where the matches occur
Ever use 'locate' to find a common phrase in a filename or directory name? Often you'll get a huge list of matches, many of which are redundant, and typically the results are not sorted. This command will 'locate' your search phrase, then show you a sorted list of just the relevant directories, with no duplications. So, for example, maybe you have installed several versions of the java jre and you want to track down every directory where files matching "java" might exist. Well, a 'locate java' is likely to return a huge list with many repeated directories since many files in one directory could contain the phrase "java". This command will whittle down the results to a minimal list of unique directory names where your search phrase finds a match.

Expand shortened URLs
curl(1) is more portable than wget(1) across Unices, so here is an alternative doing the same thing with greater portability. This shell function uses curl(1) to show what site a shortened URL is pointing to, even if there are many nested shortened URLs. This is a great way to test whether or not the shortened URL is sending you to a malicious site, or somewhere nasty that you don't want to visit. The sample output is from: $ expandurl http://t.co/LDWqmtDM

Generate a 18 character password, print the password and sha512 salted hash
Generate a 18 character password from character set a-zA-Z0-9 from /dev/urandom, pipe the output to Python which prints the password on standard out and in crypt sha512 form.

Kill all processes that listen to ports begin with 50 (50, 50x, 50xxx,...)
Run netstat as root (via sudo) to get the ID of the process listening on the desired socket. Use awk to 1) match the entry that is the listening socket, 2) matching the exact port (bounded by leading colon and end of column), 3) remove the trailing slash and process name from the last column, and finally 4) use the system(…) command to call kill to terminate the process. Two direct commands, netstat & awk, and one forked call to kill. This does kill the specific port instead of any port that starts with 50. I consider this to be safer.

Update your OpenDNS network ip
Intended for dynamic ip OpenDNS users, this command will update your OpenDNS network IP. For getting your IP, you can use one of the many one-liners here on commandlinefu. Example: I use this in a script which is run by kppp after it has successfully connected to my ISP: --- #!/bin/bash IP="`curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | grep -o '[[:digit:].]\+'`" PW="hex-obfuscated-pw-here" if [ "$IP" == "" ] ; then echo 'Not online.' ; exit 1 else wget -q --user=topsecret --password="`echo $PW | xxd -ps -r`" 'https://updates.opendns.com/nic/update?hostname=myhostname&myip='"$IP" -O - /etc/init.d/ntp-client restart & fi --- PS: DynDNS should use a similar method, if you know the URL, please post a comment. (Something with members.dyndns.org, if I recall correctly)

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Remove all the files except abc in the directory
Finds all files in the current directory and deletes them besides file called "abc"


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