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display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs
Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

find out how many days since given date
You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

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"

Fulltext search in multiple OCR'd pdfs

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 what PID is listening on port 80 on Linux

colored prompt
It colors the machine name and current directory different colors for easy viewing.

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
Backups all MySQL databases to individual files. Can be put into a script that grabs current date so you have per day backups.

listen to an offensive fortune
or replace "espeak" with "festival --tts" if you like festival better when your buddy leaves his computer unlocked use "crontab" or "at" to play at some time that would be most embarassing (during his next sales presentation) $ echo "fortune -o | espeak" | at now + 30 minutes of course you can exclude the "-o" for non offensive fortunes, or if you don't have offensive fortunes installed


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