Commands by chrisedion (1)

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Start a game on the discrete GPU (hybrid graphics)
On laptops featuring hybrid graphics and using the free X drivers, the DRI_PRIME variable indicates which GPU to run on. This alias allows to utilize the faster discrete GPU without installing proprietary drivers.

Printable random characters
Reads psuedorandom bytes from /dev/urandom, filtering out non-printable ones. Other character classes can be used, such as [:alpha:], [:digit:] and [:alnum:]. To get a string of 10 lowercase letters: $ tr -dc '[:lower:]' < /dev/urandom | head -c 10

Create A Continuous Yahoo! News Ticker For The Terminal
This creates a permanent stock ticker in the terminal. it has scrolling action and refreshes when each cycle is done to get the latest news.

Check SSL expiry from commandline

cycle through a 256 colour palette
Rainbow, instead of greys

Speed up builds and scripts, remove duplicate entries in $PATH. Users scripts are oftern bad: PATH=/apath:$PATH type of thing cause diplicate.
Thanks to the authors of: $ awk '!x[$0]++' and the author of: $ joinargs() { (local IFS="$1"; shift && echo "$*") } and others, we can have a fast Linux or android. IMPORTANT if you find a priority order problem in PATH you can push a path directory to the front without duplication as follows: $ PATH=/bin:$PATH then ... Check duplication with: $ echo $PATH|tr : '\n'|sort|uniq -d Finally do a very neat line by line list of $PATH: $ echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'} The speed up is very noticeable for android, and builds on Linux Ubantu are much faster with make and scripts. I will update the command on request. Timothy from SONY

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Get Dell Service Tag Number from a Dell Machine
This will give you the Dell Service tag number associated with your machine. Incredibly useful when you need that number for tech support or downloads.

Extract tar content without leading parent directory
If archive has leading directory level same as archive name and you want to strip it, this command is for you.

Merge PDFs with Ghostscript wrapped in a function
This is an expansion on a previous entry, which I've wrapped in a function and placed in my profile. The "$@" is a positional parameter, much like "$*", but the parameters are passed on intact, without interpretation or expansion; so you can simply call the function like this: mergepdf * This will output a merged PDF of all PDFs in the current directory. Alternatively, you can simply list them like so: mergepdf 00.pdf 01.pdf 02.pdf ... N.B. Passing a wildcard will merge all PDFs in the current directory in name order, e.g. 00.pdf 01.pdf aa.pdf ab.pdf

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