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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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detect partitions
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

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.

Check SSL expiry from commandline

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Decrypt exported android wallet keys for import into desktop client (LTC,FTC,BTC)

aptbackup restore
Use when aptbackup will not start or you just want to see what's going on.

Run a ext4 file system check and badblocks scan with progress info
Nothing fancy, just a regular filesystem scan that calls the badblocks program and shows some progress info. The used options are: -c ? check for bad sectors with badblocks program -D ? optimize directories if possible -f ? force check, even if filesystem seems clean -t ? print timing stats (use -tt for more) -y ? assume answer ?yes? to all questions -C 0 ? print progress info to stdout /dev/sdxx ? the partition to check, (e.g. /dev/sda1 for first partition on first hard disk) NOTE: Never run fsck on a mounted partition!

Ring the system bell after finishing a long script/compile
This will ring the system bell once if your script exits successfully and twice if it fails. So you can go look at something else and it will alert you when done. Don't forget to use 'xset b [vol [pitch [duration]]]' to get the bell to sound the way you want.

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.

Clear the terminal screen


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