Commands by oso (1)

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convert markdown to PDF
This is the one-line version of this htmldoc + markdown combo to convert markdown formatted text to PDF files to distribute to your non-savvy project managers. http://scottnesbitt.net/ubuntublog/?p=114

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Replace strings in text
-e is the script function, it performs search and replace like vi, and -i is the edit the file in place.

Grep for regular expression globally, list files and positions.
Grep for expression globally, list files and positions. "Hirn" is a nice german crib meaning "Brain". :-) Afterwards you can edit the line you want with "vi ./p_common/common_main.pbt +1550"

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
recursively traverse the directory structure from . down, look for string "oldstring" in all files, and replace it with "newstring", wherever found also: $ grep -rl oldstring . |xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/oldstring/newstring'

delete multiple files with spaces in filenames (with confirmation)
ls -Q will show the filenames in quotes. xargs -p rm will print all the filenames piped from ls -Q and ask for confirmation before deleting the files. without the -Q switch, if we have spaces in names, then the files won't be deleted.

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

Screenshot Directly To Clipboard
This will take a screenshot of a selected area and save it as foo.png as well as sending it straight to the clipboard for pasting into GIMP, Anki, Zim, etc.

Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL
Here Strings / A variant of here documents, the format is:


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