Commands tagged repair (3)

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Create the four oauth keys required for a Twitter stream feed
Twitter stream feeds now require authentication. This command is the FIRST in a set of five commands you'll need to get Twitter authorization for your final Twitter command. *** IMPORTANT *** Before you start, you have to get some authorization info for your "app" from Twitter. Carefully follow the instructions below: Go to dev.twitter.com/apps and choose "Create a new application". Fill in the form. You can pick any name for your app. After submitting, click on "Create my access token". Keep the resulting page open, as you'll need information from it below. If you closed the page, or want to get back to it in the future, just go to dev.twitter.com/apps Now customize FIVE THINGS on the command line as follows: 1. Replace the string "Consumer key" by copying & pasting your custom consumer key from the Twitter apps page. 2. Replace the string "Consumer secret" by copying & pasting your consumer secret from the Twitter apps page. 3. Replace the string "Access token" by copying & pasting your access token from the Twitter apps page. 4. Replace string "Access token secret" by copying & pasting your own token secret from the Twitter apps page. 5. Replace the string 19258798 with the Twitter UserID NUMBER (this is **NOT** the normal Twitter NAME of the user you want the tweet feed from. If you don't know the UserID number, head over to www.idfromuser.com and type in the user's regular Twitter name. The site will return their Twitter UserID number to you. 19258798 is the Twitter UserID for commandlinefu, so if you don't change that, you'll receive commandlinefu tweets, uhm... on the commandline :) Congratulations! You're done creating all the keys! Environment variables k1, k2, k3, and k4 now hold the four Twitter keys you will need for your next step. The variables should really have been named better, e.g. "Consumer_key", but in later commands the 256-character limit forced me to use short, unclear names here. Just remember k stands for "key". Again, remember, you can always review your requested Twitter keys at dev.twitter.com/apps. Our command line also creates four additional environment variables that are needed in the oauth process: "once", "ts", "hmac" and "id". "once" is a random number used only once that is part of the oauth procedure. HMAC is the actual key that will be used later for signing the base string. "ts" is a timestamp in the Posix time format. The last variable (id) is the user id number of the Twitter user you want to get feeds from. Note that id is ***NOT*** the twitter name, if you didn't know that, see www.idfromuser.com If you want to learn more about oauth authentication, visit oauth.net and/or go to dev.twitter.com/apps, click on any of your apps and then click on "Oauth tool" Now go look at my next command, i.e. step2, to see what happens next to these eight variables.

Random Number Between 1 And 256
It takes a byte from /dev/random whose source is the kernel entropy pool (better source than other solutions).

Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
Sometimes you're trying to read through an xml file to determine whats wrong with it and a tool had removed all the linebreaks. xmllint will go ahead and make it pretty for you.

Create user add lines from partial passwd file
Handy if you are installing a new server or recovering an old one and you have a passwd file with the accounts you want to add to the server. If you edit the file so that only the accounts that you want to add are left this line will spit out the correct useradd lines. The uid, gecos and shell will be preserved.

Quickly ping range of IP adresses and return only those that are online
Tested in Debian, ymmv. - c 1 : send only one ping;; -W 1: wait for one second and then exit ping, assuming target IP is not available; change as needed (-W 0.5 for half a second, smaller or greater value depending on network speed/latency)

Remove a line in a text file. Useful to fix
In this case it's better do to use the dedicated tool

Download entire website

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

diff files while disregarding indentation and trailing white space

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.


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