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Suspend, background, and foreground a process
1. Start a process, such as 'top' command 2. # suspend process {ctrl-Z} 3. # background process bg 4. # list all backgrounded jobs jobs 5. # bring it back to foreground fg

Find out how much data is waiting to be written to disk
Ever ask yourself "How much data would be lost if I pressed the reset button?" Scary, isn't it?

Set gnome wallpaper to a random jpg from the specified directory
Every time this is run it will change your background picture. For added fun Add some DBUS magic: . $HOME/.dbus/session-bus/`cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id`-0 export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and a crontab entry: */5 * * * * above_command_in_script.sh >/dev/null 2>/dev/null now wallpaper changes every 5 mins

Re-read partition table on specified device without rebooting system (here /dev/sda).

zsh suffix to inform you about long command ending
make, find and a lot of other programs can take a lot of time. And can do not. Supppose you write a long, complicated command and wonder if it will be done in 3 seconds or 20 minutes. Just add "R" (without quotes) suffix to it and you can do other things: zsh will inform you when you can see the results. You can replace zenity with other X Window dialogs program.

Find out my Linux distribution name and version

Count down from 10
Countdown from 10 or whatever you want:)

Watch the progress of 'dd'
run this in another terminal, were xxxx is the process ID of the running dd process. the progress will report on the original terminal that you ran dd on

Make window transparent (50% opacity) in Gnome shell
Click window to change its opacity. Source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/494289

Color STDERR in output
This command will take the output of a command and color any STDERR output as a different color (red outline in this case)


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