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Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

Find the package that installed a command

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.

Listing directory content of a directory with a lot of entries
Ever wanted to get the directory content with 'ls' or 'find' and had to wait minutes until something was printed? Perl to the rescue. The one-liner above(redirected to a file) took less than five seconds to run in a directory with more man 2 million files. One can adapt it to e.g. delete files that match a certain pattern.

Generate MD5 hash for a string

shell function which allows you to tag files by creating symbolic links directories in a 'tags' folder.
shell function which allows you to tag files by creating symbolic links directories in a 'tags' folder. The tag function takes a tag name as its first argument, then a list of files which take that tag. The directory $HOME/tags/tagname will then hold symbolic links to each of the tagged files. This function was modified from bartonski's (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/10216) inspired by tmsu (found at https://bitbucket.org/oniony/tmsu/wiki/Home) with readlink function by flxndn (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/10222). Example: $ tag dog airedale.txt .shizturc weimeraner.pl This will create $HOME/tags/dog which contains symbolic links to airedale.txt .shizturc and weimeraner.pl

See a full list of compiler defined symbols
From http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/01/msg00971.html .

Show top running processes by the number of open filehandles they have
I think I could cut down the number of pipes here, any suggestions?

Get the IP address

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 ;)


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