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Getting started with tcpdump
At some point you want to know what packets are flowing on your network. Use tcpdump for this. The man page is obtuse, to say the least, so here are some simple commands to get you started. -n means show IP numbers and don't try to translate them to names. -l means write a line as soon as it is ready. -i eth0 means trace the packets flowing through the first ethernet interface. src or dst w.x.y.z traces only packets going to or from IP address w.x.y.z. port 80 traces only packets for HTTP. proto udp traces only packets for UDP protocol. Once you are happy with each option combine them with 'and' 'or' 'not' to get the effects you want.

Outputs each arg on its own line
This can be useful for transforming command-line args into input for xargs (one per line). This can also be done with ls if the args are filenames, but that's getting awfully close to Useless Use of Cat territory (http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html).

Load your [git-controlled] working files into the vi arglist.
Branch name may be substituted, of course.

Generate a Google maps URL for GPS location data from digital photo
This command uses the "exiftool" command which is available here: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ NB, there should be a degree symbol right after the first "%d" NOT a question mark. For some unknown reason, commandlinefu is not able to handle degree symbol correctly ("?")?

Paged, colored svn diff
I put this in a shell script called "svndiff", as it provides a handy decorated "svn diff" output that is colored (which you can't see here) and paged. The -r is required so less doesn't mangle the color codes.

Bash function that saves bash functions to file from shell session
The simpler, 1-arg version is save_function(){ { date +"# %F.%T $1; declare -f "$1";}| tee -a ~/.bash_functions; }`

Release memory used by the Linux kernel on caches
The Linux kernel uses unused memory in caches. When you execute "free" you never get the "real" available memory.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Show the command line for a PID with ps
Show the command line for a PID with ps

Better way to use notify-send with at or cron
we don't need to export variables to set a env to a command, we may do this before the command directly


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