Are there any creative pieces of music that can be created using beep and the shell? I'd love to hear it!

This starts an X server using Xvfb(1) (no graphics hardware required), then starts a VNC server on the display. Change :1 if there's a conflict with an existing display, and change 800x600x24 to suit your tastes (24 is the bit depth, 800x600 is the size). This command obviously requires X be installed, and also x11vnc(1); both are available via your favourite package manager. You can also use another VNC server of your choosing, as long as DISPLAY is set to the display of Xvfb(1). To change your desktop environment (the default is twm(1), which is rather fail), you can add it to your ~/.xinitrc file (see the startx(1) manpage for details).

pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable.

Basically the opposite of:

which would beep when a server IS reachable.

You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a:

which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo.

Notes:

Requires beep package.

May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker)

Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box...

Depending on the installation only certain of these man pages are installed. 12 is left out on purpose because ISO/IEC 8859-12 does not exist. To also access those manpages that are not installed use opera (or any other browser that supports all the character sets involved) to display online versions of the manpages hosted at kernel.org:

perror should be installed if mysql-server package is installed

Let me suggest using wget for obtaining the HTTP header only as the last resort because it generates considerable textual overhead. The first ellipsis of the sample output stands for

Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.

--2009-03-31 20:42:46-- http://www.example.com/

Resolving www.example.com... 208.77.188.166

Connecting to www.example.com|208.77.188.166|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response...

and the second one looks for

Length: 438 [text/html]

Remote file exists and could contain further links,

but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.

Without the -dump option the header is displayed in lynx. You can also use w3m, the command then is

I used this to confirm an upgrade to an SSH daemon was successful

04/01/0902:11:42

Sys Temp: +11.0?C

CPU Temp: +35.5?C

AUX Temp: +3.0?C

Look for a string in one of your codes, excluding the files with svn and ~ (temp/back up files). This can be useful when you're looking for a particular string in one of your source codes for example, inside a directory which is under version control (e.g. svn), removing all the annoying files with ~ (tilde) from the search. you can even change the command after -exec to delete (rm) or view (cat) files found by 'find' for example

connect to a remote server using ftp protocol over FUSE file system, then rsync the remote folder to a local one and then unmount the remote ftp server (FUSE FS)

it can be divided to 3 different commands and you should have curlftpfs and rsync installed

this will connect to your hosted website service through the cPanel interface and use its backup tool to backup and download the entire website, locally.

(do not forget to replace : YourUsername , YourPassword and YourWebsiteUrl for it to work )

This was posted on reddit. replace 192.168.0.1-256 with the IP's you want to check.

This command will sort the contents of FILENAME by redirecting the output to individual .txt files in which 3rd column will be used for sorting. If FILENAME contents are as follows:

foo foo A foo

bar bar B bar

lorem ipsum A lorem

Then two files called A.txt and B.txt will be created and their contents will be:

A.txt

foo foo A foo

lorem ipsum A lorem

and B.txt will be

bar bar B bar

In the above example 'muspi merol' (the output of the first rev command) is sent to stderr and 'lorem ipsum' (the output of the second rev command) is sent to stdout. rev reverse lines of a file or files. This use of tee allows testing if a program correctly handles its input without using files that hold the data.

This command will copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local one.

Ensure you are in the local directory you want to populate with the remote files before running the command.

To copy a directory and it's contents, you could:

This is especially useful on *nix'es that don't have 'scp' installed by default.

This command will show the 20 processes using the most CPU time (hungriest at the bottom).

You can see the 20 most memory intensive processes (hungriest at the bottom) by running:

Or, run both:

I find it ugly & sexy at the same time isn't it ?

Empty the trash when the icon stay in the non-empty state

source: http://www.linuxquestions.org/blog/phoenixrising-455874/2009/3/3/how-to-empty-trash-in-gnome-when-the-trash-can-refuses-to-clear-1660/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Some other notable dates that have passed:

rot13 maps a..mn..z (A..MN..Z) to n..za..m (n..za..m) and so does this alias.

create a short alias for 'ls' with multi-column (-C), file type syntax additions (slashes after directories, @ for symlinks, etc... (-F), long format (-l), including hidden directories (all ./, ../, .svn, etc) (-a), show file-system blocks actually in use (-s), human readable file sizes (-h)