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Recursively grep for string and format output for vi(m)
This is a big time saver for me. I often grep source code and need to edit the findings. A single highlight of the mouse and middle mouse click (in gnome terminal) and I'm editing the exact line I just found. The color highlighting helps interpret the data.

Change prompt to MS-DOS one (joke)

Search big files with long lines
This is a handy way to circumvent the "Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded" grep error. Once you have run the above command (or put it in your .bashrc), files can be searched using: $ lgrep search-string /file/to/search

Search for a string in all files recursively

find out how many days since given date
You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

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

Change user, assume environment, stay in current dir
I've used this a number of times troubleshooting user permissions. Instead of just 'su - user' you can throw another hyphen and stay in the original directory.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off with 1 command!
Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off in any Bourne-type shell If either -x or -v is set, the function turns them both off. If neither is on, both are turned on.

strip non-constant number of directories from tar archive while decompressing
If you want to decompress the files from an archive to current directory by stripping all directory paths, use --transform option to strip path information. Unfortunately, --strip-components option is good if the target files have same and constant depth of folders. The idea was taken from http://www.unix.com/solaris/145941-how-extract-files-tar-file-without-creating-directories.html


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