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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.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Keep one instance of an irc chat client in a screen session
This command attempts to attach to existing irssi session, if one exists, otherwise creates one. I use "irc" because I use different irc clients depending on what system I am working on. Consistency is queen.

find all files containing a pattern, open them using vi and place cursor to the first match, use 'n' and ':n' to navigate

Display a Lissajous curve in text
Use Ruby's standard Curses module to display a Lissajous curve in the console. Replace the "0.2" with different numbers for different curves.

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Just use '-' to use STDIN as an additional input to 'cat'

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" }

Check if the files in current directory has the RPATH variable defined
Using gentoo prefix portage I got in a situation where some packages did not contain the needed RPATH variable. This command helped me to find out which ones I should recompile

Propagate X session cookies on a different user and login as that user
Reads a username from

BASH: Print shell variable into AWK


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