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shortcut to scp a file to the same location on a remote machine
This will copy a file from your current directory to the same location on another machine. Handy for configuring ha, copying your resolv.conf, .bashrc, anything in /usr/local, etc.

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.

rgrep: recursive grep without .svn
Only excludes .svn from filenames.

Rename files in batch

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Search through all installed packages names (on RPM systems)
You can use wildcard with rpm search but you have to do 2 things: 1. use "-a" switch (means "all") with query ("-q") switch - argument is a pattern to use while searching for package names of all installed packages 2. protect wildcards, so that shell could not eat them - escape it with backslash ("\") or enclose all pattern between apostrophes ("'"): $ rpm -qa 'co*de' As you can see above it is possible to insert wildcards into middle of the pattern. If you want, you can add "-i" or another rpm query options, "-i" will print package information for all installed packages matching pattern.

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"

Wait for an already launched program to stop before starting a new command.
Referring to the original post, if you are using $! then that means the process is a child of the current shell, so you can just use `wait $!`. If you are trying to wait for a process created outside of the current shell, then the loop on `kill -0 $PID` is good; although, you can't get the exit status of the process.

output list of modifications for an svn revision
url can be a working copy or url to a svn repository, revision is any valid revision number for that branch.

Update a tarball
This will update the tarball, adding files that have changed since the last update. This assumes that the tarball is in the same directory as the files being archived. N.B. This command can't be used on compressed tarballs. N.B. This will add the updated files to the tarball, so that the tarball will have two versions of each file. This will make the tarball larger, but doesn't have any other significant effect.


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