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Open a Remote Desktop (RDP) session with a custom resolution.
Using a widescreen monitor, I often get annoyed that the RDP window is too high, or too narrow for what I want to display. In this example, I'm on a 1680 x 1050 display.

Find the package that installed a command

copy root to new device
Clone a root partition. The reason for double-mounting the root device is to avoid any filesystem overlay issues. This is particularly important for /dev. Also, note the importance of the trailing slashes on the paths when using rsync (search the man page for "slash" for more details). rsync and bash add several subtle nuances to path handling; using trailing slashes will effectively mean "clone this directory", even when run multiple times. For example: run once to get an initial copy, and then run again in single user mode just before rebooting into the new disk. Using file globs (which miss dot-files) or leaving off the trailing slash with rsync (which will create /mnt/target/root) are traps that are easy to fall into.

Crop video starting at 00:05:00 with duration of 20 mins

List files
Shortcut to list files in the current path.

Shows you how many hours of avi video you have.
midentify.sh is part of mplayer, but you might have to locate it on your box.

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

check open ports without netstat or lsof

power off system in X minutes
Replace 60 with the number of minutes until you want the machine to shut down. Alternatively give an absolute time in the format hh:mm (shutdown -h 9:30) Or shutdown right away (shutdown -h now)

Generate pretty secure random passwords
These are my favourite switches on pwgen: -B Don't include ambiguous characters in the password -n Include at least one number in the password -y Include at least one special symbol in the password -c Include at least one capital letter in the password It just works! Add a number to set password length, add another to set how many password to output. Example: pwgen -Bnyc 12 20 this will output 20 password of 12 chars length.


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