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Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable

Check if a domain is available and get the answer in just one line
Returns nothing if the domain exists and 'No match for domain.com' otherwise.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Bytebeat
Never ending music, generated via a C snippet, piped to aplay. Taken from: http://canonical.org/~kragen/bytebeat/

Monitor a file with tail with timestamps added
This is useful when watching a log file that does not contain timestamps itself. If the file already has content when starting the command, the first lines will have the "wrong" timestamp when the command was started and not when the lines were originally written.

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.

Convert a date to timestamp
Simple way to get a timestamp from a date

Monitor system load and print out top offending processes
This checks the system load every second and if it's over a certain threshold (.8 in this example), it spits out the date, system loads and top 4 processes sorted by CPU. Additionally, the \a in the first echo creates an audible bell.

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

converting vertical line to horizontal line


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