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

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.

Show exit status of all portions of a piped command eg. ls |this_doesn't_exist |wc

One command line web server on port 80 using nc (netcat)
Very simple web server listening on port 80 will serve index.html file or whatever file you like pointing your browser at http://your-IP-address/index.html for example. If your web server is down for maintenance and you'd like to inform your visitors about it, quickly and easily, you just have to put into the index.html file the right HTML code and you are done! Of course you need to be root to run the command using port 80.

Extracts PDF pages as images

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"

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

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Display a random crass ascii art from www.asciiartfarts.com
Optionally, pipe the output into http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/html2iso.sed Or: wget -qO - http://www.asciiartfarts.com/random.cgi | sed -n '//,//p' | sed -n '/

Backup a local drive into a file on the remote host via ssh


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