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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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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.

List upgrade-able packages on Ubuntu
Taken from apticron and modified.

Install an mpkg from the command line on OSX
Installing most OSX apps is just a matter of dropping it in /Applications, either GUI-wise or with cp -r. However, many packages are distributed in "mpkg" format, and those have to be installed with an installer. If you don't want to go to the trouble of firing up VNC to install an mpkg, you can use the "installer" command. This will install an application from a .mpkg it to /Applications system-wide. To install a program for just one user, replace "-target /" with "-target username".

Use ImageMagick to get an image's properties

Get your external IP address ( 10 characters long )
Shortest url to a external IP-service, 10 characters.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Compare a remote dir with a local dir
You can compare directories on two different remote hosts as well: $ diff -y

Download all data from Google Ngram Viewer
To learn more about Google Ngram Viewer: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info

Show numerical values for each of the 256 colors in bash
I like the other three versions but one uses nested loops and another prints every color on a separate line. Both versions fail to reset colors before giving the prompt back. This version uses the column command to print a table so all the colors fit on one screen. It also resets colors back to normal before as a last step.

Quick notepad
Quick write some notes to a file with cat. Ctrl+C when you have finish.


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