Commands using echo (1,545)

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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.

Adding Prefix to File name
Good old bracket expansion :-) For large numbers of files, "rename" will spare you the for-loop, or the find/exec...

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

ping a range of IP addresses
nmap accepts a wide variety of addressing notation, multiple targets/ranges, etc.

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Download a file and uncompress it while it downloads
This will uncompress the file while it's being downloaded which makes it much faster

Convert numbers to SI notation
converts any number on the 'stdin' to SI notation. My version limits to 3 digits of precious (working with 10% resistors).

find directory with most inodes/files
Find which directory in one filesystem that contains most inodes or files.

Create incremental backups of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Problem: I wanted to backup user data individually, using and incremental method. In this example, all user data is located in "/mnt/storage/profiles", and about 25 folders inside, each with a username ( /mnt/storage/profiles/mike; /mnt/storage/profiles/lucy ...) I need each individual folder backed up, not the whole "/mnt/storage/profiles". So, using find while excluding directories depth and creating two variables (tarfile=username & desdir=destination), tar will create a .tgz file for each folder, resulting in a "mike_2013-12-05.tgz" and "lucy_2013-12-05.tgz".

urldecoding
My version uses printf and command substitution ($()) instead of echo -e and xargs, this is a few less chars, but not real substantive difference. Also supports lowercase hex letters and a backslash (\) will make it through unescaped


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