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Archive all SVN repositories in platform indepenent form
Use of hotcopy for safety/stability of the backups.

Convert A USB Cable Into A Smart Home Gadget
An old USB A/B cable is all you need to make your own Smart Home hardware! Cut off and discard the B-portion of the USB cable. On the A side, connect the RED (+) and WHITE (D-) wires via a 1 kiloohm resistor. $Picture: http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU Now plug the cable into a USB port on your Linux computer. Your hardware is ready! Run the above command after changing variable mysms to your personal email-to-SMS gateway info as required by your cellular service provider. The command uses the amazing usbmon tool (see link below) to detect the cable. For the curious, to view the raw usbmon output, run this command: (Also see the sample output) $usbmon -i usb0 How does it work? When the red and white wires are connected (via the 1 kiloohm resistor) the USB hardwere is tricked into thinking that a new USB device is trying to start up. We then use the usbmon utility to capture the host USB events as it tries to talk to the cable. The expect utility watches the usbmon stream and waits for the disconnect text "-2:128" before sending the SMS message. Finally, the sendmail tool is used to email the SMS message to your smartphone via your cellular provider's SMS-to-email gateway. As a result, when the electrical connection between the red and white wire is interrupted, or the USB cable is unplugged from your computer, you get an SMS notification of the disconnect event on your smartphone. Could this be the cheapest smart home gadget ever? What are YOU going to sense with it? Please let me know in the comments and please don't forget to click it up! $ $Links: $ http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/8/usbmon/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Pinouts http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU

determine if tcp port is open
@putnamhill, no need if statement in that case. && is a AND and || is a OR

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Polkit: Force KDE apps to always recognize your display
KDE apps expect certain variables to be set, and unfortunately pkexec doesn’t set them by default. So, by setting this alias, it becomes possible to run, e.g. “pkexec kate” or “pkexec dolphin” and it’ll actually run.

output the contents of a file removing any empty lines including lines which contain only spaces or tabs.

list files recursively by size

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" }

How to backup hard disk timely?
'data' is the directory to backup, 'backup' is directory to store snapshots. Backup files on a regular basis using hard links. Very efficient, quick. Backup data is directly available. Same as explained here : http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html in one line. Using du to check the size of your backups, the first backup counts for all the space, and other backups only files that have changed.

Find the package a command belongs to on debian-based distros


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