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Run a command that has been aliased without the alias
Most distributions alias cp to 'cp -i', which means when you attempt to copy into a directory that already contains the file, cp will prompt to overwrite. A great default to have, but when you mean to overwrite thousands of files, you don't want to sit there hitting [y] then [enter] thousands of times. Enter the backslash. It runs the command unaliased, so as in the example, cp will happily overwrite existing files much in the way mv works.

Use curl with a local SOCKS5 proxy (e.g. Tor)
Routes curl input through a local SOCKS5 proxy; in this case, anonymizes curl activity via The Onion Router (Tor) proxy running locally. Note that the traffic will be anonymized, but it will NOT be encrypted, so your traffic will be very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

find the rpm package name that provides a specific file
For Linux distributions using rpm (eg Mandriva), this command will find the rpm package name that provides a file.

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 block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Validate all XML files in the current directory and below
If everything validates, there's no output. Can be handy to run on a cron job set up to email output.

Automatically skip bad songs in your MPD playlist.
Case insensitive. Also you can pull in the songs from a blacklist, one per line - while :; do (mpc current | grep -i -f blacklist.txt && mpc next); sleep 5; done

Add an audio soundtrack to a series of images to create an flv
Creates a 5 minute flv file, with the given sequence of images and audio with 0.5 fps. The images were created using the following command: for x in `seq 0 300`; do cp ../head.PNG head-`printf '%03d' $x`.png; done You can also inject metadata to seek easier using yamdi as follows: yamdi -i muxed.flv -o video.flv

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"

Mac Sleep Timer
Schedule your Mac to sleep at any future time. Also wake, poweron, shutdown, wakeorpoweron. Or repeating with $ sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 7:00:00 Query with $ pmset -g sched Lots more at http://www.macenterprise.org/articles/powermanagementandschedulingviathecommandline


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