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To find the uptime of each process-id of particular service or process

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.

move you up one directory quickly
In bash, this turns on auto cd. If a command is just a directory name, it cd's into that directory.

Purge configuration file of all desinstalled package
From: http://www.debian-administration.org/users/fsateler/weblog/4

git log with color and path
Cool alias that show a a better Git log

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Generate a (compressed) pdf from images
use imagemagik convert

check spell in c source code

Efficient count files in directory (no recursion)
$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a - 1,"\n"}' 205413 real 0m0.497s user 0m0.220s sys 0m0.268s $ time { ls |wc -l; } 205413 real 0m3.776s user 0m3.340s sys 0m0.424s ********* ** EDIT: turns out this perl liner is mostly masturbation. this is slightly faster: $ find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l sh-3.2$ time { find . -maxdepth 1|wc -l; } 205414 real 0m0.456s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.328s ** EDIT: now a slightly faster perl version $ perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' sh-3.2$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' 205414 real 0m0.415s user 0m0.176s sys 0m0.232s

xargs for builtin bash commands
Similar to xargs -i, but works with builtin bash commands (rather than running "bash -c ..." through xargs)


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