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external projector for presentations
i spent way too many hours trying to fiddle with /etc/X11/xorg.conf trying to hook up various external projectors. too bad i didn't know this would solve all my problems.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

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.

Convert IP octets to HEX with no dots.
Converts IP octets to hex using printf command. Useful for generating pxeboot aliases in the pxelinux.cfg folder.

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (run this command as root!)
It's the same like 'cp -p' if available. It's faster over networks than scp. If you have to copy gigs of data you could also use netcat and the tar -z option in conjunction -- on the receiving end do: # nc -l 7000 | tar -xzvpf - ...and on the sending end do: # tar -czf - * | nc otherhost 7000

list files recursively by size

parrallel execution of a command on remote hosts by ssh or rsh or ...
parrallel execution of a command on remote host by ssh or rsh or ... very useful for cluster management (software update)

Generate Random Text based on Length
Random text of length "$1" without the useless cat command.

Creates a SSHFS volume on MacOS X (better used as an alias). Needs FuseFS and SSHFS (obvioulsly).
To make it even more practical, make sure you can login to the ssh server using a keypair.

Find partition name using mount point
lsblk | grep mountpoint


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