Commands by langec (5)

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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.

Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL
Thanks to OpenSSL, you can quickly and easily generate MD5 hashes for your passwords. Alternative (thanks to linuxrawkstar and atoponce): $ echo -n 'text to be encrypted' | md5sum - Note that the above method does not utlise OpenSSL.

Convert number of bytes to human readable filesize
Converts a number of bytes provided as input, to a human readable number.

zsh only: access a file when you don't know the path, if it is in PATH
Say you want to execute 'file' on the command 'top' (to determine what type of file it is); but you don't know where 'top' resides: preface the argument with = and zsh will implicitly prepend the path.

Continually monitor things
You can use this one-liner for a quick and dirty (more customizable) alternative to the watch command. The keys to making this work: everything exists in an infinite loop; the loop starts with a clear; the loop ends with a sleep. Enter whatever you'd like to keep an eye on in the middle.

Touch a file using a timestamp embedded in the file name.
tstouch takes two arguments: a filename containing a timestamp, and an extended regular expression with the parenthesized section matching a timestamp of the form YYYYMMDDhhmm or YYYYMMDDhhmm.ss. It then touches the file with that timestamp.

phpdoc shortcut
A shortcut to generate documentation with phpdoc. Defaults to HTML; optionally to PDF if third argument is given. Stores documentation in cwd under ./docs/. I forget the syntax to the output, -o, option, so this is easier.

lines in file2 that are not in file1

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Show demo of toilet fonts
Lists a sample of all installed toilet fonts


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