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Start vim without initialization
This will skip all initializations. Especially useful when your ~/.vimrc has something wrong.

Get the Volume labels all bitlocker volumes had before being encrypted
Get information of volume labels of bitlocker volumes, even if they are encrypted and locked (no access to filesystem, no password provided). Note that the volume labels can have spaces, but only if you name then before encryption. Renaming a bitlocker partition after being encrypted does not have the same effect as doing it before.

diff process output
Execute a process or list of commands in the given interval and output the difference in output.

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.

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.

Delete all empty lines from a file with vim
If you need to delete lines that may contain space characters (such as tabs or spaces) as well as empty ones, try: $:v/\S/d Just an alternative.

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Flush and then immediately start watching a file
This is useful for keeping an eye on an error log while developing. The !^ pulls the first arg from the previous command (which needs to be run in a sub-shell for this shortcut to work).

format txt as table not joining empty columns
-n switch keeps empty columns If your distribution does not ship with a recent column version that supports -n you can use this alternative: perl -pe 's/(^|;);/$1 ;/g' file.csv | column -ts\; | less -S Change the delimiter to your liking.

Put split files back together, without a for loop
After splitting a file, put them all back together a lot faster then doing $cat file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 > mainfile or $for i in {0..5}; do cat file$i > mainfile; done When splitting, be sure to do split -d for getting numbers instead of letters


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