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Rename files in batch

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Extract the contents of an RPM package to your current directory without installing them.
This assumes you have the 'rpm', 'rpm2cpio' and 'cpio' packages installed. This will extract the contents of the RPM package to your current directory. This is useful for working with the files that the package provides without installing the package on your system. Might be useful to create a temporary directory to hold the packages before running the extraction: $ mkdir /tmp/new-package/; cd /tmp/new-package

Monitor dynamic changes in the dmesg log.
Other logs can be monitored similarly, e.g. $ watch "tail -15 /var/log/daemon.log"

Generate a ZenCart-style MD5 password hash.
ZenCart uses a MD5 with a salt to secure its passwords. If you need to forcibly change someone's password to a known value within the database, this one-liner can generate the password. Change the value of 'p' to the password you want.

ps a process keeping the header info so you know what the columns of numbers mean!
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1828 0.0 0.0 5396 476 ? Ss 2008 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Convert file type to unix utf-8
converts encoding of a file to unix utf-8 useful for data files that contain what would be usable ascii text but are encoded as mpeg or some other encoding that prevents you from doing common manipulations like 'sed'

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

'hpc' in the shell - starts a maximum of n compute commands modulo n controlled in parallel, using make
this oneliner uses make and it's jobserver for parallel execution of your script. The '-j' flag for make defines number of subprocesses to launch, '-f' tells make use stdin instead of Makefile. Also make have neat flag '-l', which "Specifies that no new jobs (commands) should be started if there are others jobs running and the load is at least load (a floating-point number)." Also you can use plain Makefile, for better readability: targets = $(subst .png,.jpg,$(wildcard *.png)) $(targets): echo convert $(subst .jpg,.png,$@) $@ all : $(targets)


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