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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.

Generate random IP addresses
It never ends

List only executables installed by a debian package
Safe for whitespaces in names.

Use md5sum to check your music and movie files. Also use diff.
This is a beginning script. You can create a file with > filename. You can also use diff to compare output run at different times to verify no change in your files. I apologize in advance if this is too simple. For some it should be a start.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Show how old your linux OS installtion is
..not guaranteed to always be accurate but fun to see how old you Linux installation is based on the root partitions file system creation date.

Get IPv4 of eth0 for use with scripts
Combines wgzhao's grep | awk | sed into one awk command.

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

Recursively grep for string and format output for vi(m)
This is a big time saver for me. I often grep source code and need to edit the findings. A single highlight of the mouse and middle mouse click (in gnome terminal) and I'm editing the exact line I just found. The color highlighting helps interpret the data.

Debug your makefile
Say your dependencies specified in your Makefile (or dates on your source files) is causing 'make' to skip some source-files (that it should not) or on the other other end, if it is causing make to always build some source-files regardless of dates of target, then above command is handy to find out what 'make' thinks of your date v/s target date-wise or what dependencies are in make's view-point. The egrep part removes the extra noise, that you might want to avoid.


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