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Function to check whether a regular file ends with a newline
tail -c 1 "$1" returns the last byte in the file. Command substitution deletes any trailing newlines, so if the file ended in a newline $(tail -c 1 "$1") is now empty, and the -z test succeeds. However, $a will also be empty for an empty file, so we add -s "$1" to check that the file has a size greater than zero. Finally, -f "$1" checks that the file is a regular file -- not a directory or a socket, etc.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Mount a Windows share on the local network (Ubuntu) with user rights and use a specific samba user

Directory Tree
tree has lots of parms - man is your friend

Maximum PNG compression with optipng, advpng, and advdef
optipng and advancecomp (for the the advpng and advdef tools) are the best FOSS tools for losslessly compressing PNGs. With the above tool chain, you can cut off as much as 20% off a PNG's file size.

turn off auto hard disc boot scanning for ext3

Does a full update and cleaning in one line

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

Prints a file leaving out all blank lines and comment-only lines
Does not print any line that either: - is empty - contains only spaces or tabs - starts with # - starts with spaces/tabs followed by a #

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.


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