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Clear terminal Screen

Suppress output of loud commands you don't want to hear from
Suppresses all output to /dev/null. This could be expanded to check for a -l command line option to log the stderr to a file maybe -l file or -l to log to default quietly.log. I'm finding that I use it more often than one would think.

List files with full path

Vectorize xkcd strips
Uses ImageMagick and potrace to vectorize the input image, with parameters optimized for xkcd-like pictures.

Big Countdown Clock in seconds
Requires figlet. Other than that, this should be portable enough across all the Bourne-compatible shells (sh, bash, ksh, zsh, etc). Produces a massive number using figlet that counts down the number of seconds for any given minute interval. For example, here's a 4-minute timer: $ i=$((4*60)); while [ $i -gt 0 ]; do clear; echo $i | figlet; sleep 1; i=$(($i-1)); done; And a 1-minute timer: $ i=$((1*60)); while [ $i -gt 0 ]; do clear; echo $i | figlet; sleep 1; i=$(($i-1)); done;

Check for login failures and summarize
This command checks for the number of times when someone has tried to login to your server and failed. If there are a lot, then that user is being targeted on your system and you might want to make sure that user either has remote logins disabled, or has a strong password, or both. If your output has an "invalid" line, it is a summary of all logins from users that don't exist on your system.

Numeric zero padding file rename
This uses Perl's rename utility (you may have to call it as prename on your box) and won't choke on spaces or other characters in filenames. It will also zero pad a number even in filenames like "vacation-4.jpg".

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.

Show how old your linux OS installtion is
..not guaranteed to always be accurate but fun to see how old you Linux installation is based on the root partitions file system creation date.

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.


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