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concatenate compressed and uncompressed logs
I use zgrep because it also parses non gzip files. With ls -tr, we parse logs in time order. Greping the empty string just concatenates all logs, but you can also grep an IP, an URL...

Find the package that installed a command

Backup entire system through SSH

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.

print first n characters of any file in human readble form using hexdump
Usefull to determine unknown file type

Break lines after, for example 78 characters, but don't break within a word/string
Per default, linux/unix shells are configured with a width of 80 characters. If you like to edit a phrase or string on a line with more than 80 characters it might take long to go there (for example a line with 1000 characters and you like to edit the 98th word which is character 598-603). Maybe you might wish to use 78 characters, because if you forward the text via mail and the text will be quoted (2 extra characters at the beginning to the line "> "), you use 80 characters, otherwise 82, which are lame.

Execute a command at a given time
This is an alternative to cron which allows a one-off task to be scheduled for a certain time.

Display ncurses based network monitor
Nload is part of nload package, tested under Debian. Nload display network bandwidth statistics, -u m options stands for MBit unit measure.

Directory bookmarks
pushd and popd are your friends, but sometimes they're just incompatible with the way one works... Two shell functions: bm bookmarkname - "bookmarks" the current directory, just 'cd $BMbookmarkname' to return to it. forget bookmarkname - unsets the 'bookmarkname' variable. It isn't mandatory, they cease to exist when the session ends.

Retrieve the size of a file on a server
- Where $URL is the URL of the file. - Replace the $2 by $3 at the end to get a human-readable size. Credits to svanberg @ ArchLinux forums for original idea. Edit: Replaced command with better version by FRUiT. (removed unnecessary grep)


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