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Record camera's output to a avi file
video.avi is the resulting file. Press Ctrl+c to stop the recording. You can change the OVC option to another to record into a different format.

Unlock your KDE4.3 session remotely
The unlock command for KDE 4.3 has changed from krunner_lock, this process doesn't exist anymore. So here's the update :-) If qdbus complains about not being able to find X, put a "DISPLAY=:0 " (:0 being your X server display) in front of the command.

easily find megabyte eating files or directories
sorts the files by integer megabytes, which should be enough to (interactively) find the space wasters. Now you can $ dush for the above output, $ dush -n 3 for only the 3 biggest files and so on. It's always a good idea to have this line in your .profile or .bashrc

Grab IP address on machine with multiple interfaces
Instead of hard-coding in a check to scrape info from ifconfig based on a specific interface, do it in a more portable way. This works really well if you switch between wired, wireless, bluetooth or even VPN connections. You can get your current IP in a script (since it'll be something like tun0 instead of eth0 or wlan1). This uses a well known public ip address 8.8.8.8, but it doesn't actually connect to it, it just shows you the route it would take.

Create a backdoor on a machine to allow remote connection to bash
My netcat (nc-1.84-10.fc6) doesn't have the -e option, so I have to do it like this. Of course, instead of bash, you can use any executable, including scripts.

Perform sed substitution on all but the last line of input
In this simple example the command will add a comma to the end of every line except the last. I found this really useful when programatically constructing sql scripts. See sample output for example.

Scan for nearby Bluetooth devices.
Scans local area for visible Bluetooth devices. Use 'hcitool inq' to discover the type of device it is. And use -i hciX option to specify the local Bluetooth device to use.

find all active IP addresses in a network

Parse m3u playlist file for total time
Parse an m3u file with seconds for each item and output the length of the entire playlist

Watch the disk fill up
While copying a large file that may take up a good chunk of your hard drive, start the copy and run this command concurrently. It will print out the disk information every second. It's pretty handy when you have a large copy with nothing to monitor the progress.


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