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Copy your ssh public key to a server from a machine that doesn't have ssh-copy-id
This one is a bit more robust -- the remote machine may not have an .ssh directory, and it may not have an authorized_keys file, but if it does already, and you want to replace your ssh public key for some reason, this will work in that case as well, without duplicating the entry.

cat a bunch of small files with file indication
If you have a bunch of small files that you want to cat to read, you can cat each alone (boring); do a cat *, and you won't see what line is for what file, or do a grep . *. "." will match any string and grep in multifile mode will place a $filename: before each matched line. It works recursively too!!

Prettify XML in pipeline
xmllint2 comes with GNU libxml2 library. (based on: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Format_your_xml_document_using_xmllint)

Close specify detached screen
-X Send the specified command to a running screen session. -S Option to specify the screen session if you have several screen sessions running. $screen -ls for listing current screens and its sessionname

Get windows IPv4 and nothing else
May be useful to get user's ip address over the phone, as users struggle to read through a long ipconfig result.

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

Create a square thumbnail or favicon using ImageMagick
Resize `file.png` to a 32x32 px image. Use a value other than 32 to create other icon sizes (e.g. 16x16 or 32x32). Combine two favicon sizes using: `convert icon-16px.png icon-32px.png favicon.ico` For a social media preview image, use `2:1#` for the extent and `1200` for the scale.

Create a temporary file
To create directory, use: $ tempdir=$(/bin/mktemp -d)

download the contents of a remote folder in the current local folder

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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