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Uptime in minute

Belgian banking "structured communication"
Derived from current time down to minutes.

Fibonacci numbers with awk
Another combination of seq and awk. Not very efficient, but sufficiently quick.

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.

list files recursively by size

Create a persistent connection to a machine
Create a persistent SSH connection to the host in the background. Combine this with settings in your ~/.ssh/config: Host host ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster no All the SSH connections to the machine will then go through the persisten SSH socket. This is very useful if you are using SSH to synchronize files (using rsync/sftp/cvs/svn) on a regular basis because it won't create a new socket each time to open an ssh connection.

Debug bash shell scripts.
Display commands and their arguments as they are executed. Useful for debugging shell scripts.

grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power
Parallel does not suffer from the risk of mixing of output that xargs suffers from. -j+0 will run as many jobs in parallel as you have cores. With parallel you only need -0 (and -print0) if your filenames contain a '\n'. Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

Resume scp of a big file

Nice info browser
pinfo package provide a nice info alternative based on ncurses.


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