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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.

Dump the root directory to an external hard drive
This will compress the root directory to an external hard drive and split it to parts once it reaches the 4 Gigs file system limit. You can simply restore it with: $ restore ivf /media/My\ Passport/Fedora10bckup/root_dump_fedora

Adding Prefix to File name

Carriage return for reprinting on the same line
The above code is just an example of printing on the same line, hit Ctrl + C to stop When using echo -ne "something\r", echo will: - print "something" - dont print a new line (-n) - interpret \r as carriage return, going back to the start of the line (-e) Remember to print some white spaces after the output if your command will print lines of different sizes, mainly if one line will be smaller than the previous Edit from reading comments: You can achieve the same effect using printf (more standardized than echo): while true; do printf "%-80s\r" "$(date)"; sleep 1; done

Do one ping to a URL, I use this in a MRTG gauge graph to monitor connectivity

Use "most" as your man pager
you should have the "most" package installed. I like it because it is colorful and easier to read. alternatively you can use "less" instead of "most". you can also add this to your ~/.bashrc to make it permanent.

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

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"

Remote mysql dump all databases with ssh

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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