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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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Cut the first 'N' characters of a line
You can also cut charactes starting from X to N.

list files recursively by size

Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes.
works best in a shell script run at startup. It will ping localhost once and output to null, after it does that, acpi is called for temperature in fahrenheit and piped through to another loop that feeds notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over.

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.

Find broken symlinks and delete them
This command is adapted from http://otomaton.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/find-broken-symbolic-links/ Solutions with $ find -L don't work when the link is a loop, an error message is printed.

Ping sweep without NMAP
Waits for all pings to complete and returns ip with mac address

Capture screen and mic input using FFmpeg and ALSA
Yet another x11grab using ffmpeg. I also added mic input to the capturing video stream using alsa. Yet I need to find out how to capture audio which is currently playing.

list files recursively by size

Mouse Tracking
Will track your mouse and save it to a file. You can use gnuplot to graph it: $ gnuplot -persist

Delay execution until load average falls under 1.5
If shell escaping of the command is problematic, you can write the command to a file first: $ batch


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