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Put the machine to sleep after the download(wget) is done
[Note: This command needs to be run as root]. If you are downloading something large at night, you can start wget as a normal user and issue the above command as root. When the download is done, the computer will automatically go to sleep. If at any time you feel the computer should not go to sleep automatically(like if you find the download still continuing in the morning), just create an empty file called nosleep in /tmp directory.

Add calendar to desktop wallpaper
Add calendar to desktop wallpaper , mess with the coordinates to place where you like

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

output stats from a running dd command to see its progress
if you start a large dd and forgot about statistics, but you still wonder what the progress is this command in an OTHER terminal will show you the way. NOTE: the watch command by itself will not output anything NOTE: the kill command will not kill the process

Print nic name of current connection

Delete line number 10 from file
Very useful when the ssh key of a host has changed and ssh refuses to connect to the machine, while giving you the line number that has changed in ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

Create a local compressed tarball from remote host directory
The command uses ssh(1) to get to a remote host, uses tar(1) to archive a remote directory, prints the result to STDOUT, which is piped to gzip(1) to compress to a local file. In other words, we are archiving and compressing a remote directory to our local box.

list files recursively by size

Console clock
Shows a simple clock in the console -t param removes the watch header Ctrl-c to exit

find previously entered commands (requires configuring .inputrc)
[Click the "show sample output" link to see how to use this keystroke.]   Meta-p is one of my all time most used and most loved features of working at the command line. It's also one that surprisingly few people know about. To use it with bash (actually in any readline application), you'll need to add a couple lines to your .inputrc then have bash reread the .inputrc using the bind command:   $ echo '"\en": history-search-forward' >> ~/.inputrc   $ echo '"\ep": history-search-backward' >> ~/.inputrc   $ bind -f ~/.inputrc     I first learned about this feature in tcsh. When I switched over to bash about fifteen years ago, I had assumed I'd prefer ^R to search in reverse. Intuitively ^R seemed better since you could search for an argument instead of a command. I think that, like using a microkernel for the Hurd, it sounded so obviously right fifteen years ago, but that was only because the older way had benefits we hadn't known about.     I think many of you who use the command line as much as I do know that we can just be thinking about what results we want and our fingers will start typing the commands needed. I assume it's some sort of parallel processing going on with the linguistic part of the brain. Unfortunately, that parallelism doesn't seem to work (at least for me) with searching the history. I realize I can save myself typing using the history shortly after my fingers have already started "speaking". But, when I hit ^R in Bash, everything I've already typed gets ignored and I have to stop and think again about what I was doing. It's a small bump in the road but it can be annoying, especially for long-time command line users. Usually M-p is exactly what I need to save myself time and trouble.     If you use the command line a lot, please give Meta-p a try. You may be surprised how it frees your brain to process more smoothly in parallel. (Or maybe it won't. Post here and let me know either way. ☺)


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