Commands by jonty (6)

  • Use vi commands to edit your command lines

    If you spend all day editing in vi then switching your fingers to Emacs mode just for the command line can be difficult. Use set -o vi in your bash shell and enjoy the power of a real editor.


    1
    set -o vi; ls -l jnuk<ESC>bCjunk
    jonty · 2009-02-05 22:58:51 48
  • The simplest way to transport information over a network

    Einstein's razor: As simple as possible, but not simpler. On the destination machine netcat listens on any port (1234 in the example) and sends anything it receives into a file or pipe. On the source machine a separate netcat takes input from a file or pipe and sends it over the network to the listener. This is great between machines on a LAN where you don't care about authentication, encryption, or compression and I would recommend it for being simpler than anything else in this situation. Over the internet you should use something with better security.


    3
    (on destination machine) nc -l 1234 > whatever; (on source machine) nc destination 1234 < whatever;
    jonty · 2009-02-05 21:35:08 16
  • Getting started with tcpdump

    At some point you want to know what packets are flowing on your network. Use tcpdump for this. The man page is obtuse, to say the least, so here are some simple commands to get you started. -n means show IP numbers and don't try to translate them to names. -l means write a line as soon as it is ready. -i eth0 means trace the packets flowing through the first ethernet interface. src or dst w.x.y.z traces only packets going to or from IP address w.x.y.z. port 80 traces only packets for HTTP. proto udp traces only packets for UDP protocol. Once you are happy with each option combine them with 'and' 'or' 'not' to get the effects you want.


    2
    tcpdump -nli eth0; tcpdump -nli eth0 src or dst w.x.y.z; tcpdump -nli eth0 port 80; tcpdump -nli eth0 proto udp
    jonty · 2009-02-05 17:41:55 16
  • Start a new command in a new screen window

    If you are already running screen then you often want to start a command in a fresh window. You use this alias by typing 's whatever' from your command line and 'whatever' starts running in a new window. Good with interactive commands like info, vim, and nethack.


    19
    alias s='screen -X screen'; s top; s vi; s man ls;
    jonty · 2009-02-05 13:47:14 38
  • Get me yesterday's date, even if today is 1-Mar-2008 and yesterday was 29-Feb-2008

    Fool date by setting the timezone out by 24 hours and you get yesterday's date. Try TZ=XYZ-24 to get tomorrow's date. I live in TZ=GMT0BST so you might need to shift the number 24 by the hours in your timezone.


    1
    TZ=XYZ24 date
    jonty · 2009-02-05 13:27:14 25
  • Link all the files in this directory to that directory

    I find this handy for linking all the bin files in a package to /usr/bin or all the man files to /usr/share/man. You can replace * with */* to operate on all the files in subdirectories.


    0
    cd /this/directory; for f in *; do ln -s `pwd`/$f /that/directory; done
    jonty · 2009-02-05 13:21:16 47

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How to establish a remote Gnu screen session that you can re-connect to
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To convert **.wav to **.mp3 using LAME running one process per CPU core run:

doing some floating point math

Use curl with a local SOCKS5 proxy (e.g. Tor)
Routes curl input through a local SOCKS5 proxy; in this case, anonymizes curl activity via The Onion Router (Tor) proxy running locally. Note that the traffic will be anonymized, but it will NOT be encrypted, so your traffic will be very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Setup a persistant SSH tunnel w/ pre-shared key authentication
This creates a persistent ssh -i /path/to/key -ND local-IP:PORT User@Server connection. You may have to install autossh. -f puts in daemon mode. if you are having trouble, try it without -f.

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

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)

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

Takes and displays screenshot of Android phone over adb.
Dependencies on phone: adb access, screencap command, base64 command. Dependencies on computer: adb, sed, base64, display (from imagemagick, but can substitute other image viewer which reads from stdin). This should work around adb stupidies (i.e. that it replaces \n with \r\n) with base64.

Extract rpm package name, version and release using some fancy sed regex
This command could seem pretty pointless especially when you can get the same result more easily using the rpm builtin queryformat, like: $ rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n" | sort | column -t but nonetheless I've learned that sometimes it can be quite interesting trying to explore alternative ways to accomplish the same task (as Perl folks like to say: There's more than one way to do it!)

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