Commands by metropolis (6)

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Use xdg-open to avoid hard coding browser commands
I rarely use the system menu to start applications. I use keyboard shortcuts instead. Keyboard shortcuts are convenient time savers. To configure the shortcuts I use gconf-editor or CompizConfig Settings Manager (if I have Compiz turned on). Lately I've been using Chromium as my browser. Since Chromium is under heavy development it occasionally becomes unusable and I have to switch back to Firefox. I was hard-coding the browser command in my keyboard shortcuts. This became problematic with frequent browser hopping. I now use the xdg-open command when defining my keyboard shortcuts. xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. In the metacity keybinging_commands I have xdg-open http://gmail.com where I used to have firefox http://gmail.com. Now when switching browsers I don't have to update each keyboard binding command I just change my default browser in Ubuntu by clicking through the menu: System / Preferences / Preferred Applications / Web Browser. xdg-open is more convenient for this browser hopper.

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.

Add an audio soundtrack to a series of images to create an flv
Creates a 5 minute flv file, with the given sequence of images and audio with 0.5 fps. The images were created using the following command: for x in `seq 0 300`; do cp ../head.PNG head-`printf '%03d' $x`.png; done You can also inject metadata to seek easier using yamdi as follows: yamdi -i muxed.flv -o video.flv

top svn committers (without awk)
list top committers (and number of their commits) of svn repository. in this example it counts revisions of current directory.

Mirror a directory structure from websites with an Apache-generated file indexes
wget/curl/friends are not good with mirroring files off websites, especially those with Apache-generated directory listings. These tools endlessly waste time downloading useless index HTML pages. lftp's mirror command does a better job without the mess.

Show available conversions
aliases on each line. i.e. txt2html: $recode ..HTML file.html txt to Base64: $recode ../b64 file.b64 and so on.

Prevent shell autologout
Unset TMOUT or set it to 0 in order to prevent shell autologout. TMOUT is the number of seconds after which the present shell will be killed if it has been idle for that long.

Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)
This dup finder saves time by comparing size first, then md5sum, it doesn't delete anything, just lists them.

Get lines count of a list of files
This command gives you the number of lines of every file in the folder and its subfolders matching the search options specified in the find command. It also gives the total amount of lines of these files. The combination of print0 and files0-from options makes the whole command simple and efficient.

Play music from youtube without download


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