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Debug redirects between production reloads
Watches the headers of a curl, following any redirects and printing only the HTTP status and the location of the possible redirects.

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.

Skype conversation logs to IRC-format logs

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Display current time in requested time zones.
The time zone names come from the tz database which is usually found at /usr/share/zoneinfo.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example: $ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

Determine what an process is actually doing

Convert an existing Git repo to a bare repo
If you want to turn a Git repo into the origin that folks can push to, you should make it a bare repository. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2199897/git-convert-normal-to-bare-repository

Show directories
Show only the subdirectories in the current directory. In the example above, /lib has 135 files and directories. With this command, the 9 dirs jump out.

Find all file extension in current dir.


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