Commands using echo (1,545)

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pretend to be busy in office to enjoy a cup of coffee
Create a progress dialog with custom title and text using zenity.

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.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Run bash on top of a vi session (saved or not saved), run multiple commands, instead of one at a time with :!(bashcommand), type exit and [enter] to get back to where you left off in vi.
Helps when I'm editing a script and want to double check some commands without having to exit out of vi multiple times or having to use another terminal session.

Reclaim standard in from the tty for a script that is in a pipeline
This will grab the controlling tty regardless of what STDOUT and STDERR are doing.

Click on a GUI window and show its process ID and command used to run the process
This command is useful when you want to know what process is responsible for a certain GUI application and what command you need to issue to launch it in terminal.

List the Sizes of Folders and Directories
I wanted an easy way to list out the sizes of directories and all of the contents of those directories recursively.

Find top 10 largest files in /var directory (subdirectories and hidden files included )
Should work even when very large files exist.

Compare two CSV files, discarding any repeated lines
The value for the sort command's -k argument is the column in the CSV file to sort on. In this example, it sorts on the second column. You must use some form of the sort command in order for uniq to work properly.

An alarm clock using xmms2 and at
Nice little alarm clock to wake you up on time (hopefully). You can also do 'echo "vlc path/to/song" | at 6:00


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