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Check to make sure the whois nameservers match the nameserver records from the nameservers themselves
Change the $domain variable to whichever domain you wish to query. Works with the majority of whois info; for some that won't, you may have to compromise: domain=google.com; for a in $(whois $domain | grep "Domain servers in listed order:" --after 3 | grep -v "Domain servers in listed order:"); do echo ">>> Nameservers for $domain from $a

Generate a random password 30 characters long
This command is similar to the alternate, except with head(1), you can pick as many passwords as you wish to generate by changing the number of lines you wish to preview.

Watch Al Jazeera Livestream directly in mplayer #jan25
One cannot call the high quality livestream directly, but command this gives you a session ID and the high quality stream. #egypt #jan25

list files recursively by size

Every Nth line position # (SED)
sed extract every nth line. Generic is: $ sed -n 'STARTPOSITION,${p;n;*LINE}' foo where n;*LINE = how many lines. thus p;n;n; is "for every 3 lines" and p;n;n;n;n; is "for every 5 lines"

Adding Color Escape Codes to global CC array for use by echo -e
I was looking for the fastest way to create a bunch of ansi escapes for use in echo -e commands throughout a lot of my shell scripts. This is what I came up with, and I actually stick that loop command in a function and then just call that at the beginning of my scripts to not clutter the environment with these escape codes, which can wreck havok on my terminal when I'm dumping the environment. More of a cool way to store escape ansi codes in an array. You can echo them like: $ echo -e "${CC[15]}This text is black on bright green background." I usually just use with a function: $ # setup_colors - Adds colors to array CC for global use $ # 30 - Black, 31 - Red, 32 - Green, 33 - Yellow, 34 - Blue, 35 - Magenta, 36 - Blue/Green, 37 - White, 30/42 - Black on Green '30\;42' $ function setup_colors(){ declare -ax CC; for i in `seq 0 7`;do ii=$(($i+7));CC[$i]="\033[1;3${i}m";CC[$ii]="\033[0;3${i}m";done;CC[15]="\033[30;42m"; export R='\033[0;00m';export X="\033[1;37m"; }; $ export -f setup_colors CC[15] has a background of bright green which is why it is separate. R resets everything, and X is my default font of bright white. $ CC[15]="\033[30;42m"; R=$'\033[0;00m'; X=$'\033[1;37m' Those are just my favorite colors that I often use in my scripts. You can test which colors by running $ for i in $(seq 0 $((${#CC[@]} - 1))); do echo -e "${CC[$i]}[$i]\n$R"; done See: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html for more usage.

Function that outputs dots every second until command completes
Very useful in shell scripts because you can run a task nicely in the background using job-control and output progress until it completes. Here's an example of how I use it in backup scripts to run gpg in the background to encrypt an archive file (which I create in this same way). $! is the process ID of the last run command, which is saved here as the variable PI, then sleeper is called with the process id of the gpg task (PI), and sleeper is also specified to output : instead of the default . every 3 seconds instead of the default 1. So a shorter version would be sleeper $!; The wait is also used here, though it may not be needed on your system. $ echo ">>> ENCRYPTING SQL BACKUP" $ gpg --output archive.tgz.asc --encrypt archive.tgz 1>/dev/null & $ PI=$!; sleeper $PI ":" 3; wait $PI && rm archive.tgz &>/dev/null Previously to get around the $! not always being available, I would instead check for the existance of the process ID by checking if the directory /proc/$PID existed, but not everyone uses proc anymore. That version is currently the one at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html but I plan on upgrading to this new version soon.

Analyse an Apache access log for the most common IP addresses
This uses awk to grab the IP address from each request and then sorts and summarises the top 10.

list files recursively by size

Check to make sure the whois nameservers match the nameserver records from the nameservers themselves
Change the $domain variable to whichever domain you wish to query. Works with the majority of whois info; for some that won't, you may have to compromise: domain=google.com; for a in $(whois $domain | grep "Domain servers in listed order:" --after 3 | grep -v "Domain servers in listed order:"); do echo ">>> Nameservers for $domain from $a


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