Commands by mindfuckup (1)

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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.

To print a specific line from a file
Just one character longer than the sed version ('FNR==5' versus -n 5p). On my system, without using "exit" or "q", the awk version is over four times faster on a ~900K file using the following timing comparison: $ testfile="testfile"; for cmd in "awk 'FNR==20'" "sed -n '20p'"; do echo; echo $cmd; eval "$cmd $testfile"; for i in {1..3}; do time for j in {1..100}; do eval "$cmd $testfile" >/dev/null; done; done; done Adding "exit" or "q" made the difference between awk and sed negligible and produced a four-fold improvement over the awk timing without the "exit". For long files, an exit can speed things up: $ awk 'FNR==5{print;exit}'

Replace multiple spaces with semicolon

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Using awk to sum/count a column of numbers.
Takes a input file (count.txt) that looks like: 1 2 3 4 5 It will add/sum the first column of numbers.

cat a bunch of small files with file indication
If you have a bunch of small files that you want to cat to read, you can cat each alone (boring); do a cat *, and you won't see what line is for what file, or do a grep . *. "." will match any string and grep in multifile mode will place a $filename: before each matched line. It works recursively too!!

Easily run a program in the background without losing output
This function runs a program in the background, and logs all output to an automatically created logfile. That way, you can still get at the output without it clogging up your terminal. Tip: Throw fork() and this: $for prog in firefox kate konqueror ;do alias $prog="fork $prog";done into your bashrc, so that they'll automatically run out of the way.

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

adjust laptop display hardware brightness [non root]

Crop video starting at 00:05:00 with duration of 20 mins

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