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1:1 copy of a volume
copies all files from the source disk / (skipping boundaries of mouted -in volumes) to /mnt/mydisk. Logical links are being preserved as well as devices, pipes etc. This can copy a MacOS X or Linux volume and keep it bootable. Note: its not suited to copy files with MacOS 9 style resources.

Get playlist for Livestream on YouTube

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.

sort lines by length
making it "sound" more "natural" language like -- additionally sorting the longest words alphabetically: this approach is using: * to get at all lines of input * post-"for" structure * short-circuit-or in sort: if the lengths are the same, then sort alphabetically otherwise don't even evaluate the right hand side of the or * -C sets all input and ouput channels to utf8

Create a 5 MB blank file via a seek hole
Similar to the original, but is much faster since it only needs to write the last byte as zero. A diff on testfile and testfile.seek will return that they are the same.

Make a dedicated folder for each zip file
${f%*.zip} strips off the extension from zip filenames

Calculate N!

The Chronic: run a command every N seconds in the background
Chronic Bash function: $ chronic 3600 time # Print the time in your shell every hour $ chronic 60 updatedb > /dev/null # update slocate every minute Note: use 'jobs' to list background tasks and fg/bg to take control of them.

Downmix from stereo to mono and play radio stream with mplayer
The solution to a year long (and extremely frustrating) problem I've had, caused by the fact that I only have one speaker; this command downmixes the stream to monophonic output, making sure I don't miss any of the music. NOTE: When stream is in .m3u format, a -playlist option is required, as shown below: $ mplayer -af pan=1:0.5:0.5 -channels 1 -playlist radiostream.m3u This command works great with aliases for various channels in .bashrc. Sample below: $ alias radio1='mplayer -af pan=1:0.5:0.5 -channels 1 radio1stream.pls'

convert several jpg into one pdf file
require ImageMagick and GhostScript paquet


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