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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Convert text to lowercase
Usage: lower [STRING]...

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.

Play online music videos in terminal
pvl 'link1' 'link2' 'link3' Play Youtube, Vimeo, etc links without visual elements. Great for music videos when you just want the audio. You can control mplayer with this! Hit Ctrl-C twice to exit (if you're playing multiple files)

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.

Deleting / Ignoring lines from the top of a file

find and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir

Find the package that installed a command

Ctrl+S Ctrl+Q terminal output lock and unlock
These are simple shortcuts to pause and continue terminal output, works in most terminals and screen multiplexers like screen. You can use it to catch something if things change too fast, and scroll with Shift + PgUp PgDown. On linux console ScrollLock can also be used.

random xkcd comic
i sorta stole this from http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=878#MTC_form but it didn't work, so here it is, fixed. --- updated to work with jpegs, and to use a fancy positive look behind assertion.


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