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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.

Rename files in batch

See n most used commands in your bash history
You can append these commands to the bottom of the history file to access them easier with the Up key: $ sort ~/.bash_history|uniq -c|sort -n|tail -n 10|tr -s " "|cut -d' ' -f3- >> ~/.bash_history

Pimp your less
# s = combine multiple lines of whitespace into 1 # x4 = set the tabstop to 4 instead of 8 # F = Exit if the output fits on 1 screen. This is similar to git diff # R = Raw control chars. This allows you to pipe colordiff straight to less. ie: alias sdi="svn diff | colordiff | less" # S = Chop off long lines # X = Dont send termcap init and deinit scrings to the terminal

Change wallpaper

Show a Package Version on RPM based distributions
if you want to see all information about a package use: rpm -qi pkgname full list of querytags can be accessed by the command: rpm --querytags you can also customize the query format how ever you like with using more querytags together along with escape sequences in "man printf"! you can also use more than one package name. for example this command shows name and version in to columns: rpm -q --queryformat %-30{NAME}%{VERSION}\\n pkg1 pkg2

Send command to all terminals in a screen session

Tail a log file with long lines truncated
This truncates any lines longer than 80 characters. Also useful for looking at different parts of the line, e.g. cut -b 50-100 shows columns 50 through 100.

output absolute path of the present working directory
I've seen a lot of overly complicated attempts at figuring out "where am I?" I think this is a part of the problem: type -a pwd force the use of the binary version of `pwd` instead of the built-in with "/bin/pwd -P" -P option provides an absolute path to the present working directory for the overly cautious type: $(which pwd) -P

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
Backups all MySQL databases to individual files. Can be put into a script that grabs current date so you have per day backups.


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