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Run entire shell script as root
Placing sudo in the shebang line of a shell script runs the entire thing as root. Useful for scripts designed to, e.g. automate system upgrades or package manager wrappers — makes prepending everything with sudo no longer necessary

tar.gz with gpg-encryption on the fly
Create a encrypted tar.gz file from a directory on the fly. The encryption is done by GPG with a public key. The resulting filename is tagged with the date of creation. Very usefull for encrypted snapshots of folders.

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.

Compress a series of png pictures to an avi movie.
cd /path/to/your/png_pics mencoder "mf://*.png" -mf fps=2 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 then you can get a movie named output.avi.

Creates Solaris alternate boot environment on another zpool.
PS: 'lustatus' gives the list of all alternate boot environments.

Hide or show Desktop Icons on MacOS
Hides all Files and Folders on the MacOS Desktop. To show files and folders, type "true" instead of "false". "Finder" at the end is case sensitive, "finder" doesn’t work

happened to find this not bad software to keep my files and folders safe! Even the free trial version has the fantastic functions to protect any private files from being seen by anyone except me. With it I can encrypt, hide or lock anything I want, amazin
I noticed some spammer posted an advertisement here for "not bad" encryption. Unfortunately, their software only runs under Microsoft Windows and fails to work from the commandline. My shell script improves upon those two aspects, with no loss in security, using the exact same "military-grade" encryption technology, which has the ultra-cool codename "ROT-13". For extra security, I recommend running ROT-13 twice.

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

Check if you work on a virtual/physical machine in Linux
Command used to know if we are working on a virtual or physical machine. This command will use the dmidecode utility to retrieve hardware information of your computer via the BIOS. Run this command as root or with sudo.

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
Please check out my blog article on this for more detail. http://jdubb.net/blog/2009/08/07/monitor-wireshark-capture-real-time-on-remote-host-via-ssh/


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