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Watch the progress of 'dd'
Only slightly different than previous commands. The benefit is that your "watch" should die when the dd command has completed. (Of course this would depend on /proc being available)

Print diagram of user/groups
Parses /etc/group to "dot" format and pases it to "display" (imagemagick) to show a usefull diagram of users and groups (don't show empty groups).

When was your OS installed?
Show time and date when you installed your OS.

find broken symbolic links
== remove broken links == find -L . -type l -exec rm -rf {} \; == how this work == "symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, unless the symbolic link is broken. If you want to search for symbolic links when -L is in effect, use -xtype." -- manpage of find.

Create commands to download all of your Picasaweb albums
Create commands to download all of your Picasaweb albums Install Googlecl (http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) and authenticate first.

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.

Grep colorized
Highlights the search pattern in red.

Search trought pidgin's conversation logs for "searchterm", and output the result.
will search trought pidgin conversation logs for "searchterm", and output them stripping the html tags. The "sed" command is optionnal if your logs are stored in plain text format.

Random line from bash.org (funny IRC quotes)
bash.org is a collection of funny quotes from IRC. WARNING: some of the quotes contain "adult" jokes... may be embarrassing if your boss sees them... Thanks to Chen for the idea and initial version! This script downloads a page with random quotes, filters the html to retrieve just one liners quotes and outputs the first one. Just barely under the required 255 chars :) Improvment: You can replace the head -1 at the end by: $awk 'length($0)>0 {printf( $0 "\n%%\n" )}' > bash_quotes.txt which will separate the quotes with a "%" and place it in the file. and then: $strfile bash_quotes.txt which will make the file ready for the fortune command and then you can: $fortune bash_quotes.txt which will give you a random quote from those in the downloaded file. I download a file periodically and then use the fortune in .bashrc so I see a funny quote every time I open a terminal.

Perl One Liner to Generate a Random IP Address
A bash version.


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