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AWS Route53 hosted zone export
Frustrated with the manual domain migration process AWS has, I unsuccessfully tried to install cli53, route53-transfer. I instead wrote this oneliner to ease the export (which is not supported via the AWS console ATM). The output can be easily pasted into the "Import Hosted Zone" dialog in Route53. SOA/NS records are excluded since they cannot be automatically imported.

Test disk I/O
Especially useful to gauge the performance of a VPS.

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"

Script Terminal Session
script -f /tmp/foo will place all output of the terminal, including carriage returns, to a file. This file can be tail dash-eff'ed by one or more other terminals to display the information of the main terminal. Good way to share one's screen on short notice. Note: This produces a very accurate output, but that includes depending on the size of your terminal to be the same. You can clear screens or even resize the terminal for others using this function; I use it in conjunction with the "mid" command in my list.

Watching Command
If you need to keep an eye on a command whose output is changing, use the watch command. For example, to keep an eye on your load average

get a directory from one machine to another using tar and ssh

Remove a range of lines from a file
Delete a range of line

Create a tar of directory structure only

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

execute your commands hiding secret bits from history records
$ wget --user=username --password="$password" http://example.org/ Instead of hiding commands entirely from history, I prefer to use "read" to put the password into a variable, and then use that variable in the commands instead of the password. Without the "-e" and "-s" it should work in any bourne-type shell, but the -s is what makes sure the password doesn't get echoed to the screen at all. (-e makes editing work a bit better)


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