Commands by sixtus (2)

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Read and write to TCP or UDP sockets with common bash tools
Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

port scan using parallel
It takes over 5 seconds to scan a single port on a single host using nmap $ time (nmap -p 80 192.168.1.1 &> /dev/null) real 0m5.109s user 0m0.102s sys 0m0.004s It took netcat about 2.5 minutes to scan port 80 on the class C $ time (for NUM in {1..255} ; do nc -w 1 -z -v 192.168.1.${NUM} 80 ; done &> /dev/null) real 2m28.651s user 0m0.136s sys 0m0.341s Using parallel, I am able to scan port 80 on the entire class C in under 2 seconds $ time (seq 1 255 | parallel -j255 'nc -w 1 -z -v 192.168.1.{} 80' &> /dev/null) real 0m1.957s user 0m0.457s sys 0m0.994s

List just the executable files (or directories) in current directory
A bit shorter ;)

Count opening and closing braces in a string.
This function counts the opening and closing braces in a string. This is useful if you have eg long boolean expressions with many braces and you simply want to check if you didn't forget to close one.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Update all packages installed via homebrew
As of March 7, 2012: $ brew update - downloads upgraded formulas $ brew upgrade [FORMULA...] - upgrades the specified formulas $ brew outdated - lists outdated installations Note updating all packages may take an excruciatingly long time. You might consider a discriminating approach: run `brew outdated` and select specific packages needing an upgrade. For more information see homebrew's git repository: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

Remove all HTML tags from a file

Convert a flv video file to avi using mencoder

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

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