Commands using ssh (347)

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intersection between two files

Backup a directory structure
Copies a directory structure from /home/ to /backups/home (notice that the destination does not have a trailing slash)

count the number of specific characters in a file or text stream
In this example, the command will recursively find files (-type f) under /some/path, where the path ends in .mp3, case insensitive (-iregex). It will then output a single line of output (-print0), with results terminated by a the null character (octal 000). Suitable for piping to xargs -0. This type of output avoids issues with garbage in paths, like unclosed quotes. The tr command then strips away everything but the null chars, finally piping to wc -c, to get a character count. I have found this very useful, to verify one is getting the right number of before you actually process the results through xargs or similar. Yes, one can issue the find without the -print0 and use wc -l, however if you want to be 1000% sure your find command is giving you the expected number of results, this is a simple way to check. The approach can be made in to a function and then included in .bashrc or similar. e.g. $ count_chars() { tr -d -c "$1" | wc -c; } In this form it provides a versatile character counter of text streams :)

Using netcat to copy files between servers
It bypasses encryption overhead of SSH and depending on configuration can be significantly faster. It's recommended to use only in trusted networks.

Change every instance of OLD to NEW in file FILE
Very quick way to change a word in a file. I use it all the time to change variable names in my PHP scripts (sed -i 's/$oldvar/$newvar/g' index.php)

Clone current directory into /destination verbosely
Copy every file from current directory to destination preserving modification time.

Execute a command without saving it in the history
Prepending one or more spaces to your command won't be saved in history. Useful for pr0n or passwords on the commandline. Tested on BASH.

Url Encode
It only encodes non-Basic-ASCII chars, as they are the only ones not well readed by UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin-1). It converts all * C3 X (some latin symbols like ASCII-extended ones) and * C2 X (some punctuation symbols like inverted exclamation) ...UTF-8 double byte symbols to escaped form that every parser understands to form the URLs. I didn't encode spaces and the rest of basic punctuation, but supposedly, space and others are coded as \x20, for example, in UTF-8, latin-1 and Windows-cp1252.... so its read perfectly. Please feel free to correct, the application to which I designe that function works as expected with my assumption. Note: I specify a w=999, I didn't find a flag to put unlimited value. I just suppose very improbable surpass the de-facto 255 (* 3 byte max) = 765 bytes length of URL

Translate your terminal into Swedish Chef
Bork, bork, bork! To keep it short, the first terminal line doesn't show a prompt.

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


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