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I hate `echo X | Y`
apart from not being generalisable to all shells, `Y <<< X` seems nicer to me than `echo X | Y`, e.g. $ <<< lol cat; it reads easier, you type less, and it also looks cool

Mac OS X: Change Color of the ls Command
I use terminal with black background on the Mac. Unfortunately, the default ls color for the directory is blue, which is very hard to see. By including the line above in my ~/.bash_profile file, I changed the directory's color to cyan, which is easer to see. For more information on the syntax of the LSCOLORS shell variable: $ man ls I tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard

Doing some floating point calculations with rounding (e.g. at the 3rd decimal)

Print without executing the last command that starts with...
It happens that sometime you remember that you used a special command short time before and you want to check the command again. WIth this command you can just put the beginning of a command and then bash will look for you and it will print back safely withou executing

gzip compression with progress bar and remaining time displayed

Monitor dynamic changes in the dmesg log.
Other logs can be monitored similarly, e.g. $ watch "tail -15 /var/log/daemon.log"

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

ARP Scan
A much quicker and (not dirtier) option. use the man page for help. On linux/ubuntu you will need to `sudo apt-get -y install arp-scan`.

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

convert flac to mp3
if you haven't already done so, install lame and flac: sudo apt-get install lame flac


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