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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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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.

Set pcap & SUID Bit for priv. network programs (like nmap)

easily strace all your apache *child* processes
Like the original version except it does not include the parent apache process or the grep process and adds "sudo" so it can be run by user.

View network activity of any application or user in realtime
The "-r 2" option puts lsof in repeat mode, with updates every 2 seconds. (Ctrl -c quits) The "-p" option is used to specify the application PID you want to monitor. The "-u' option can be used to keep an eye on a users network activity. "lsof -r 2 -u username -i -a"

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"

Tail a log-file over the network
Netcat is used to serve a log-file over a network on port 1234. Point a browser to the specified server/port combo to view log-file updates in real-time.

execute a shell with netcat without -e
how to execute a shell on a server with a netcat binary which doesn't support -e option

Show IP Address in prompt --> PS1 var
when working with many machines in a computer lab need to know the IP addr is very large, this is a simplistic solution to make things easier

Generate Sha1, MD5 hash using echo
This is mostly for my own notes but this command will compute a md5 message digest from the command line. You can also replace md5sum with other checksum commands (e.g., sha1sum)

Vectorize xkcd strips
Uses ImageMagick and potrace to vectorize the input image, with parameters optimized for xkcd-like pictures.


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