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git log with color and path
Cool alias that show a a better Git log

Report bugs in Ubuntu
As of 10.04 LTS, you need to use this command-line to reports bugs to the launchpad.net tracking system (you need a launchpad acct for this to work). This command is preferred over using the website because it collects/sends info about your system to help developers. ubuntu-bug is a symlink to apport-bug which sees if KDE/Gnome is running and calls apport-gtk/apport-kde dialogs, otherwise apport-cli, so you can fill out a bug report. First run 'ubuntu-bug' without args to see a list of known symptoms. If there's no matching symptom, or you know which package is to blame, then run 'ubuntu-bug <package>'. If the process is still running, use 'ubuntu-bug <PID>'

Adjust gamma so monitor doesn't mess up your body's clock
[UPDATE: Now works for multiple connected outputs] I woke up around midnight with an urge to do some late night hacking, but I didn't want a bright monitor screwing up my body's circadian rhythm. I've heard that at night blue (short wavelength) lights are particularly bad for your diurnal clock. That may be a bunch of hooey, but it is true that redder (longer wavelength) colors are easier on my eyes at night. This command makes the screen dimmer and adjusts the gamma curves to improve contrast, particularly darkening blues and greens (Rɣ=2, Gɣ=3, Bɣ=4). To reset your screen to normal, you can run this command: $ xrandr | sed -n 's/ connected.*//p' | xargs -n1 -tri xrandr --output {} --brightness 1 --gamma 1:1:1 or, more briefly, $ xgamma -g 1 Note: The sed part is fragile and wrong. I'm doing it this way because of a misfeature in xrandr(1), which requires an output be specified but has no programmatic way of querying available outputs. Someone needs to patch up xrandr to be shell script friendly or at least add virtual outputs named "PRIMARY" and "ALL". . Todo: Screen should dim (gradually) at sunset and brighten at sunrise. I think this could be done with a self-resubmitting at job, but I'm running into the commandlinefu 127 character limit just getting the sunrise time: $ wget http://aa.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/aa_pap.pl --post-data=$(date "+xxy=%Y&xxm=%m&xxd=%d")"&st=WA&place=Seattle" -q -O- | sed -rn 's/\W*Sunrise\W*(.*)/\1/p' I hope some clever hacker comes up with a command line interface to Google's "OneBox", since the correct time shows up as the first hit when googling for "sunrise:cityname". . [Thank you to @flatcap for the sed improvement, which is much better than the head|tail|cut silliness I had before. And thank you to @braunmagrin for pointing out that the "connected" output may not be on the second line.]

Skip over .svn directories when using the
Put the positive clauses after the '-o' option.

concatenate compressed and uncompressed logs
with zcat force option it's even simpler.

Get a list of the top 10 heaviest tables in your mysql database - useful for performance diagnostics

Find name of package which installed a given shell command
Some command names are very different from the name of the package that installed them. Sometimes, you may want to find out the name of the package that provided a command on a system, so that you can install it on another system.

Simple XML tag extract with sed
Limited, but useful construct to extract text embedded in XML tags. This will only work if bar is all on one line. If nobody posts an alternative for the multiline sed version, I'll figure it out later...

MySQL dump restore with progress bar and ETA
Display a progress bar while restoring a MySQL dump.

Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL
Thanks to OpenSSL, you can quickly and easily generate MD5 hashes for your passwords. Alternative (thanks to linuxrawkstar and atoponce): $ echo -n 'text to be encrypted' | md5sum - Note that the above method does not utlise OpenSSL.


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