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Emulate tail using awk.
This awk codes emulates tail. For efficiency it uses a circular array, which stores only N number of records. Using awk gives the flexibility of modifying the output as needed, for example adding the record number (NR) at the output and much more.

Adjust gamma so monitor doesn't mess up your body's clock
[UPDATE: Now works for multiple connected outputs] I woke up around midnight with an urge to do some late night hacking, but I didn't want a bright monitor screwing up my body's circadian rhythm. I've heard that at night blue (short wavelength) lights are particularly bad for your diurnal clock. That may be a bunch of hooey, but it is true that redder (longer wavelength) colors are easier on my eyes at night. This command makes the screen dimmer and adjusts the gamma curves to improve contrast, particularly darkening blues and greens (Rɣ=2, Gɣ=3, Bɣ=4). To reset your screen to normal, you can run this command: $ xrandr | sed -n 's/ connected.*//p' | xargs -n1 -tri xrandr --output {} --brightness 1 --gamma 1:1:1 or, more briefly, $ xgamma -g 1 Note: The sed part is fragile and wrong. I'm doing it this way because of a misfeature in xrandr(1), which requires an output be specified but has no programmatic way of querying available outputs. Someone needs to patch up xrandr to be shell script friendly or at least add virtual outputs named "PRIMARY" and "ALL". . Todo: Screen should dim (gradually) at sunset and brighten at sunrise. I think this could be done with a self-resubmitting at job, but I'm running into the commandlinefu 127 character limit just getting the sunrise time: $ wget http://aa.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/aa_pap.pl --post-data=$(date "+xxy=%Y&xxm=%m&xxd=%d")"&st=WA&place=Seattle" -q -O- | sed -rn 's/\W*Sunrise\W*(.*)/\1/p' I hope some clever hacker comes up with a command line interface to Google's "OneBox", since the correct time shows up as the first hit when googling for "sunrise:cityname". . [Thank you to @flatcap for the sed improvement, which is much better than the head|tail|cut silliness I had before. And thank you to @braunmagrin for pointing out that the "connected" output may not be on the second line.]

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Convert GoogleCL gmail contacts to cone adress book
Full Command: $ google contacts list name,name,email|perl -pne 's%^((?!N\/A)(.+?)),((?!N\/A)(.+?)),([a-z0-9\._-]+\@([a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]\.)+([a-z]+\.)?([a-z]+))%${1}:${3} %imx'|grep -oP '^((?!N\/A)(.+?)) ' | sort You'll need googlecl and python-gdata. First setup google cl via: $ google Then give your PC access $ google contacts list name,email Then do the command, save it or use this one to dump it in the cone-address.txt file in your home dir: $ google contacts list name,name,email | perl -p -n -e 's%^((?!N\/A)(.+?)),((?!N\/A)(.+?)),([a-z0-9\._-]+\@([a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]\.)+([a-z]+\.)?([a-z]+))%${1}:${3} %imx' | grep -o -P '^((?!N\/A)(.+?)) ' | sort > ~/cone-adress.txt Then import into cone. It filters out multiple emails, and contacts with no email that have N/A. (Picasa photo persons without email for example...)

find text in a file
this will find text in the directory you specify and give you line where it appears.

1+2-3+4-5+6-7 Series

Use lynx to run repeating website actions
This command will tell lynx to read keystrokes from the specified file - which can be used in a cronjob to auto-login on websites that give you points for logging in once a day *cough cough* (which is why I used -accept_all_cookies). For creating your keystroke file, use: $ lynx -cmd_log yourfile

backup and remove files with access time older than 5 days.
create an archive of files with access time older than 5 days, and remove original files.

Ring the system bell after finishing a long script/compile
This will ring the system bell once if your script exits successfully and twice if it fails. So you can go look at something else and it will alert you when done. Don't forget to use 'xset b [vol [pitch [duration]]]' to get the bell to sound the way you want.

Show me just the ip address
Sometimes it's useful to output just the ip address. Or some other information, changing the "ipv4.addresses" in command. The power of awk! Show all possible "greps" with $ nmcli connection show [yourInterfaceNameHere]


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