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Emergency Alien Invasion Warning
When aliens invade Earth, be first to warn your neighbours by placing your computer screen at a window and executing this potentially Earth-saving command. Ctrl C when aliens are defeated.

Print trending topics on Twitter

copy root to new device
Clone a root partition. The reason for double-mounting the root device is to avoid any filesystem overlay issues. This is particularly important for /dev. Also, note the importance of the trailing slashes on the paths when using rsync (search the man page for "slash" for more details). rsync and bash add several subtle nuances to path handling; using trailing slashes will effectively mean "clone this directory", even when run multiple times. For example: run once to get an initial copy, and then run again in single user mode just before rebooting into the new disk. Using file globs (which miss dot-files) or leaving off the trailing slash with rsync (which will create /mnt/target/root) are traps that are easy to fall into.

Pause Current Thread
Hold ctrl and press z to pause the current thread. Run $fg to resume it.

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

exec chmod to subfiles
Using `-exec cmd {} +` causes find to build the command using all matching filenames before execution, rather than once per file.

Place the NUM-th argument of the most recent command on the shell
After executing a command with multiple arguments like cp ./temp/test.sh ~/prog/ifdown.sh you can paste any argument of the previous command to the console, like ls -l ALT+1+. is equivalent to ls -l ./temp/test.sh ALT+0+. stands for command itself ('ls' in this case) Simple ALT+. cycles through last arguments of previous commands.

Get NFL/MLB Scores/Time
change the nfl in the url to mlb or nba to get those score/times as well

Remote screenshot
Say if you're logged into a remote system via ssh and this system has an x window system, but yet you still want a screen shot of what's going on graphically. This will do it for you. :-)

Open a file in a GTK+ dialog window
I use zenity because it's a rewrite of gdialog and also replaces gmessage and has more useful options. Using --text-info allows you to select and copy the text to your clipboard. To see a file in a list dialog: cat /etc/passwd | zenity --width 800 --height 600 --list --column Entries If you don't have zenity, you'll have to download it via apt-get install zenity, etc.


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