Command line AES with openssl (and tar)

2020-04-09

I had a script that would take a file and a passphrase and either encrypt it or, if already encrypted, decrypt it. It worked well enough and I got to play with the struct library. But it was home grown–so not compatible with anything–and didn’t properly validate anything. It worked well enough, but perhaps I could do something better.

Get kitten

2020-04-01

I upload a lot of images when testing for various things. And of course, I don’t want to use any of my own images. So what would I do instead?

Kittens!

$ get-kitten

Downloading a 640 x 480 kitten
Downloading to kitten-1.jpg

$ open kitten-1.jpg

Perfect.

Split a file with headers

2020-03-30

I have a bunch of files with Arabic content that I need to split into chunks so they can be better run in parallel¹. But by default, when I open them in a text editor, the encoding changes from windows-1256 to utf-8². I could use the Unix split command to break them into chunks, but I need to preserve the headers. So… how do I fix all this?

Write a script!

work-on: A Quick Script for Context Switching

2019-05-07

I work on a lot of projects.

$ ls ~/Projects/ | wc -l
      29

$ ls ~/Projects/work/ | wc -l
      67

And that’s just what I have checked out at the moment. 😇

Tiny Helper Scripts for Command Line MySQL

2019-04-27

Quite often, I’ll find myself wanting to query and manipulate MySQL data entirely on the command line. I could be building up a pipeline or working on a task that I’m going to eventually automate but haven’t quite gotten to yet. Whenver I have to do something like that, I have a small pile of scripts I’ve written over time that help out:

skiphead: Skip the first line of output, used to skip over headers in a query response
skipuntil: Skip all lines until we see one matching a pattern, used to resume partial tasks
commaify: Take a list of single values on the command line and turn them into a comma separated list (for use in IN clauses)
csv2json: a previously posted script for converting csv/tab delimited output to json
jq: not my script, but used to take the output of csv2json and query it further in ways that would be complicated to do with SQL

Admitedly, the first two of those are one liners and I could easily remember them, but the advantage of a single command that does it is tab completion. sk<tab>, arrow to select which one I want, and off we go. I could put them as an alias, but I don’t always use the same shell (mostly fish, but sometimes Bash or Zsh).

Creating a temporary SMTP server to 'catch' domain validation emails

2018-07-09

One problem that has come up a time or two is dealing with email-based domain validation (specifically in this case for the issuance of TLS certificates) on domains that aren’t actually configured to receive email. Yes, in a perfect world, it would be easier to switch to DNS-based validation (since we have to have control of the DNS for the domain, we need it later), but let’s just assume that’s not an option. So, how do we ‘catch’ the activation email so we can prove we can receive email on that domain?

Parsing AWS instance data with jq

2015-04-01

Semi-random amusing code snippet of the day:

aws ec2 describe-instances | jq << EOF
    .[][].Instances[]
    | select(.Tags[]?.Value == "production")
    | .PrivateIpAddress
EOF