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output absolute path of the present working directory
I've seen a lot of overly complicated attempts at figuring out "where am I?" I think this is a part of the problem: type -a pwd force the use of the binary version of `pwd` instead of the built-in with "/bin/pwd -P" -P option provides an absolute path to the present working directory for the overly cautious type: $(which pwd) -P

remote diff with side-by-side ordering.
more information: man sdiff

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.

Check the status of a network interface

Find the package that installed a command

Show what a given user has open using lsof

Empty the linux buffer cache

List detailed information about a ZIP archive
list zipfile info in long Unix ``ls -l'' format.

resume other user's screen session via su, without pty error
Normally, if you su to another user from root and try to resume that other user's screen session, you will get an error like "Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0' - please check." This is because the other user doesn't have permission for root's pty. You can get around this by running a "script" session as the new user, before trying to resume the screen session. Note you will have to execute each of the three commands separately, not all on the same line as shown here. Credit: I found this at http://www.hjackson.org/blog/archives/2008/11/29/cannot-open-your-terminal-dev-pts-please-check.

Print every Nth line (to a maximum)
Thanks to knoppix5 for the idea :-) Print selected lines from a file or the output of a command. Usage: $ every NTH MAX [FILE] Print every NTH line (from the first MAX lines) of FILE. If FILE is omitted, stdin is used. The command simply passes the input to a sed script: $ sed -n -e "${2}q" -e "0~${1}p" ${3:-/dev/stdin} print no output $ sed -n quit after this many lines (controlled by the second parameter) $ -e "${2}q" print every NTH line (controlled by the first parameter) $ -e "0~${1}p" take input from $3 (if it exists) otherwise use /dev/stdin ${3:-/dev/stdin}


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