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Open a Remote Desktop (RDP) session with a custom resolution.
Using a widescreen monitor, I often get annoyed that the RDP window is too high, or too narrow for what I want to display. In this example, I'm on a 1680 x 1050 display.

quickly backup or copy a file with bash

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

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" }

Wait the end of prog1 and launch prog2

all out
How to force a userid to log out of a Linux host, by killing all processes owned by the user, including login shells:

Recursively scan directories for mp3s and pass them to mplayer
The command first deletes any old playlist calles playlist.tmp under /tmp. After that it recursively searches all direcotries under ~/mp3 and stores the result in /tmp/playlist.tmp. After havin created the playlist, the command will execute mplayer which will shuffle through the playlist. This command is aliased to m is aliased to `rm -rf /tmp/playlist.tmp && find ~/mp3 -name *.mp3 > /tmp/playlist.tmp && mplayer -playlist /tmp/playlist.tmp -shuffle -loop 0 | grep Playing' in my ~/.bashrc.

Temporarily suspend and unsuspend a foreground job
Press ^Z, do what you need to do on the shell, then input % to resurrect the suspended job.

Tail a log file with long lines truncated
This truncates any lines longer than 80 characters. Also useful for looking at different parts of the line, e.g. cut -b 50-100 shows columns 50 through 100.

First file editor for newbies
This command should be the first file-editing command for a newbie. It clears file.txt (cat), and asks for input until EOF is entered on its own line (not written to file.txt).


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