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Random unsigned integer
works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.

do 'foo' until it exits successfully, pausing in between crashes
restart a buggy script when it dies. works great for "git svn fetch", which leaks memory like a sieve and eventually dies...making you restart it.

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.

'hpc' in the shell - starts a maximum of n compute commands modulo n controlled in parallel, using make
this oneliner uses make and it's jobserver for parallel execution of your script. The '-j' flag for make defines number of subprocesses to launch, '-f' tells make use stdin instead of Makefile. Also make have neat flag '-l', which "Specifies that no new jobs (commands) should be started if there are others jobs running and the load is at least load (a floating-point number)." Also you can use plain Makefile, for better readability: targets = $(subst .png,.jpg,$(wildcard *.png)) $(targets): echo convert $(subst .jpg,.png,$@) $@ all : $(targets)

find large files

Quick notepad
Quick write some notes to a file with cat. Ctrl+C when you have finish.

complete extraction of a debian-package
extracts the debian-package $debfile to $extractdir, including all packaging-information. to repack the package, just type: $dpkg-deb -b $extractdir

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Identify differences between directories (possibly on different servers)
This can be much faster than downloading one or both trees to a common servers and comparing the files there. After, only those files could be copied down for deeper comparison if needed.

Every Nth line position # (AWK)
A better way to show the file lines 3n + 1


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