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Salvage a borked terminal
If you bork your terminal by sending binary data to STDOUT or similar, you can get your terminal back using this command rather than killing and restarting the session. Note that you often won't be able to see the characters as you type them.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

SAR - List the average memory usage for all days recorded under '/var/log/sa/*' using sar -r.

Count files beneath current directory (including subfolders)

Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

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.

Listen to a song from youtube with youtube-dl and mpv
Explanation Firstly the function checks if user gave it any input, and notifies the user if they failed to do so. If user has inputed a search string, the function will call upon youtube-dl to find url of the audio of the first matching youtube video and play that with mpv. Call function by wrapping search string in quotes: listen-to-yt "sultans of swing" You have to paste the line in your .zshrc and source .zshrc for it to work. Limitations The dependancies are youtube-dl and mpv. this oneliner is stolen from http://www.bashoneliners.com/oneliners/302/

Recursively find top 20 largest files (> 1MB) sort human readable format
Search for files and list the 20 largest. $ find . -type f gives us a list of file, recursively, starting from here (.) $ -print0 | xargs -0 du -h separate the names of files with NULL characters, so we're not confused by spaces then xargs run the du command to find their size (in human-readable form -- 64M not 64123456) $ | sort -hr use sort to arrange the list in size order. sort -h knows that 1M is bigger than 9K $ | head -20 finally only select the top twenty out of the list


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