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play high-res video files on a slow processor
Certain codecs in high res don't play so well on my Dell Mini 9. Using this command, I can play just about anything and it keeps the sound in sync to boot!

Force logout after 24 hours idle
Shell timeout variables (TMOUT) can be very liberal about what is classified as 'activity', like having an editor open. This command string will terminate the login shell for an user with more than a day's idle time.

Find the package a command belongs to on debian-based distros
Advanced revision to the command 8776 . This revision follows symbolic links. The quotation-marks surrounding $(which $1) allows for graceful handling of errors ( ie. readlink does not complain incase 'which' command generates (null) output)

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

List all information about all files (in current dir)
This is a funny usage of the traditional command ls. It could be basically simplified as: $ ls -a -l Duplicating arguments is permitted: $ ls -a -l -l And this markup could be shortened as: $ ls -al Extra note: To view filesizes like a pro, pray for your God: $ ls -allah

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Rename files in batch

Empty a file
Immediately make a file empty. This even works if the file is still being written to. Great for cleaning up huge log files!

view hex mode in vim

DELETE all those duplicate files but one based on md5 hash comparision in the current directory tree
This one-liner will the *delete* without any further confirmation all 100% duplicates but one based on their md5 hash in the current directory tree (i.e including files in its subdirectories). Good for cleaning up collections of mp3 files or pictures of your dog|cat|kids|wife being present in gazillion incarnations on hd. md5sum can be substituted with sha1sum without problems. The actual filename is not taken into account-just the hash is used. Whatever sort thinks is the first filename is kept. It is assumed that the filename does not contain 0x00. As per the good suggestion in the first comment, this one does a hard link instead: $ find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | perl -ne 'chomp; $ph=$h; ($h,$f)=split(/\s+/,$_,2); if ($h ne $ph) { $k = $f; } else { unlink($f); link($k, $f); }'


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