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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.

RDP through SSH tunnel
This command will: 1. open an SSH tunnel to 2. go to background 3. wait for 10 seconds for the connection 4. during the 10 seconds wait it will localy run 'rdesktop' to connect to the remote host through the created SSH tunnel. Password-less log in can be achieved (when server allows it) by adding '-p ' to the 'rdesktop' command

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"

Creates Solaris alternate boot environment on another zpool.
PS: 'lustatus' gives the list of all alternate boot environments.

rotate the compiz cube via command line
0-1279 = desktop 1 region = face 1 1280-2559 = face 2 ==>> wmctrl 1280 = wmctrl (1281,...2559) are all the same for a 1280 monitor resolution math: argument of wmctrl -o = ( DesiredFace * HorizontalResolution - 1)

Perl Command Line Interpreter
My Programming Languages professor assigned my class a homework assignment where we had to write a Perl interpreter using Perl. I really like Python's interactive command line interpreter which inspired this Perl script.

Find longest running non-root processes on a machine
If you have ever been trying to look for a list of processes based on their elapsed time you don't need to look any further. This command lets you find the list of processes ordered in a reversed order (oldest at the top) that have been running for over an hour on your system. Any system processes are filtered out, leaving only user initiated ones in. I find it extremely useful for debugging and performance analysis.

Copy a MySQL Database to a new Server via SSH with one command
Dumps a MySQL database over a compressed SSH tunnel and uses it as input to mysql - i think that is the fastest and best way to migrate a DB to a new server!

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Buffer in order to avoir mistakes with redirections that empty your files
A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file. It can be easily avoided because of : 1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file" 2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file. Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...


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