Commands by gtron (2)

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do 'foo' until it exits successfully, pausing in between crashes
restart a buggy script when it dies. works great for "git svn fetch", which leaks memory like a sieve and eventually dies...making you restart it.

Mount a partition from within a complete disk dump
Suppose you made a backup of your hard disk with dd: dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/disk/backup.img This command enables you to mount a partition from inside this image, so you can access your files directly. Substitute PARTITION=1 with the number of the partition you want to mount (returned from sfdisk -d yourfile.img).

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

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.

list files recursively by size

runs a X session within your X session
http://www.debian-administration.org/article/Running_multiple_X11_sessions

Rescan partitions on a SCSI device
Used this after cloning a disk with dd to make the newly written partitions show up in /dev/

Change the primary group of a user

Hypnosis
rather don't depend on those sleepin'pills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_sheep

strace like SystemTap script
The stap script is : #! /usr/bin/env stap probe syscall.* { if (pid() == target()) printf("%s %s\n", name, argstr); }


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