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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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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 and reduce 8x parallel the size of PNG images without loosing quality via optipng

Start dd and show progress every X seconds

Check if x509 certificate file and rsa private key match
A x509 certificate and a rsa key file have in common a parameter called modulus, it is a very long hexadecimal number. That value is unique for each certficate / key pair. The command allows to do the check of this pair of values in a script using a great feature of bash. "

Generate a random left-hand password
Generates a random 8-character password that can be typed using only the left hand on a QWERTY keyboard. Useful to avoid taking your hand off of the mouse, especially if your username is left-handed. Change the 8 to your length of choice, add or remove characters from the list based on your preferences or kezboard layout, etc.

print all network interfaces' names and IPv4 addresses
ifconfig can't properly display interface's name longer 9 symbols,also it can't show IPs added thru ip command, so 'ip' should be used instead. This alias properly shows long names, bond interfaces and all interface aliases. loopback interface is ignored, since its IP is obvious

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Download all manuals RedHat 7 (CentOS/Fedora) with one command in Linux

strip config files of comments
some configuration files, particularly those installed by default as part of a package, have tons of comment lines, to help you know what's possible to configure, and what it means. That's nice, but sometimes you just want to see what specifically what _has_ been configured. That's when I use the above snippet, which I save as a bash alias 'nocom' (for 'no comments'). Apache default config files are perfect examples of when/why this script is handy.

Perform sed substitution on all but the last line of input
In this simple example the command will add a comma to the end of every line except the last. I found this really useful when programatically constructing sql scripts. See sample output for example.


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