LaTeX is not a smart compiler - You need to run it several times to make it back-patch all the missing refs. The message if to do so or not is buried in its endless output and the log file. This grep lines helps to find it.

Puts words on new lines, removing additional newlines.

Simply translates whitespace to newlines. Could be enhanced to compress out extra newlines, but that might be better handled in the next tool down the pipe, with eg uniq(1).

Remove annoying improperly packaged files that untar into the incorrect directory.

Example, When you untar and it extracts hundreds of files into the current directory.... bleh.

Basically it creates a typical word list file from any normal text.

When I make a latex document, I need to compile three times for generate an updated index of contents. With ruby on command line, I run this operation with a fast one liner.

Update twitter from commandline, without revealing your password and without having to type it interactively.

You 'll need to put a line "machine twitter.com login TWITTERUSER password TWITTERPASS" in $HOME/.netrc and better chmod 600 that file.

Creates a PDF (over ps as intermediate format) out of any given manpage.

Other useful arguments for the -T switch are dvi, utf8 or latin1.

This will create a permanent alias to colorize the search pattern in your grep output

This will backup the _contents_ of /media/SOURCE to /media/TARGET where TARGET is formatted with ntfs. The --modify-window lets rsync ignore the less accurate timestamps of NTFS.

Handy use of bc in the command line. No need to get 'into' the bc to perform calculations

For Gentoo:

If you do not use this command, portage will fetch the source again, and rebuild the hole application from the top.

This command make portage keep all files that ar allready built

If you want a visual representation of the parent/child relationships between processes, this is one easy way to do it. It's useful in debugging collections of shell scripts, because it provides something like a call traceback.

When a shell script breaks, just remember "awwfux".

Find which package a file belongs to on Solaris along with it's packaging system metadata.

Logtool is a nice tool that can export log file to various format, but its strength lies in the capacity of colorize logs. This command take a log as input and colorize it, then export it to an html file for a more confortable view. Logtool is part of logtool package.Tested on Debian.

: new command allow to split a Vim screen in two separate windows. Each window can handle its own buffer.

Passing the -c new options when Vim start cause to split screen automatically.

Nload is part of nload package, tested under Debian. Nload display network bandwidth statistics, -u m options stands for MBit unit measure.

you don't need to echo, just a plain redirect is enough to empty the file

Empties all files in /var/log over 5000k. Useful if /var goes crazy or if you just haven't cleaned up in a while.

Seen here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/