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Annoying PROMPT_COMMAND animation
unset PROMPT_COMMAND to disable.

List Threads by Pid along with Thread Start Time
This command will list all threads started by a particular pid along with the start time of each thread. This is very valuable when diagnosing thread leaks.

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.

Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

rgrep: recursive grep without .svn
Only excludes .svn from filenames.

Monitoring sessions that arrive at your server

Lists unambigously names of all xml elements used in files in current directory
This set of commands was very convenient for me when I was preparing some xml files for typesetting a book. I wanted to check what styles I had to prepare but coudn't remember all tags that I used. This one saved me from error-prone browsing of all my files. It should be also useful if one tries to process xml files with xsl, when using own xml application.

Change user, assume environment, stay in current dir
I've used this a number of times troubleshooting user permissions. Instead of just 'su - user' you can throw another hyphen and stay in the original directory.

LIST FILENAMES OF FILES CREATED TODAY IN CURRENT DIRECTORY
Then pipe to 'xargs ls' for a familiar listing, possibly using find's -print0 and xarg's -0 options.

Get the gravatar UTL for a given email address


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