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sort the contents of a text file in place.
sorts the contents of a file without the need for a second file to take the sorted output. This was previously entered as `sort -g list.txt -o $_` but as others have pointed out the $_ references the previous command. so this would've worked had that been the second part of a command joined with && like: cat list.txt && sort -g list.txt -o $_ The user below me Robin had the most correct command.

get partitions that are over 50% usage

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.

vim easter egg
inside vim try: :help 42 to get the meaning of life, the universe and everything !

Simple example of the trap command

Alternative for basename using grep to extract file name
Here's a bash version.

sends your internal IP by email
This is useful if you have need to do port forwarding and your router doesn't assign static IPs, you can add it to a script in a cron job that checks if you IP as recently changed or with a trigger script. This was tested on Mac OSX.

github push-ing behind draconian proxies!
If you are behind a restrictive proxy/firewall that blocks port 22 connections but allows SSL on 443 (like most do) then you can still push changes to your github repository. Your .ssh/config file should contain: Host * ForwardX11 no TCPKeepAlive yes ProtocolKeepAlives 30 ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -v -p -d %h:443 Host User git Hostname ssh.github.com ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa IdentitiesOnly yes Basically proxytunnel "tunnels" your ssh connection through port 443. You could also use corkscrew or some other tunneling program that is available in your distro's repository. PS: I generally use "github.com" as the SSH-HOST so that urls of the kind git@github.com:USER/REPO.git work transparently :) You

Compare two CSV files, discarding any repeated lines
The value for the sort command's -k argument is the column in the CSV file to sort on. In this example, it sorts on the second column. You must use some form of the sort command in order for uniq to work properly.

Show the total number of changes that every user committed to a Subversion repository
This saves Subversion's log output as XML and then runs an XQuery over it. This is standard XQuery 1.0 and should therefore also work with other XQuery processors. I have tested it with Zorba (http://www.zorba-xquery.com). XQilla (http://xqilla.sourceforge.net) also does it, but you'd have to save the query to a file and then execute "xqilla filename.xq". The query first finds all distinct authors and then, for each author, sums up the number of paths they have changed in each commit. This accounts for commits of multiple changes at once. The indenting space in all lines from the second one seems to be due to a bug in Zorba.


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