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Put a console clock in top right corner
Gives not only date but also some interesting status about the System

Display usb power mode on all devices

sudo for launching gui apps in background
Need package: gksu Note: Launching gui app in background that needs sudo, won't work great with our old friendly style of launching: $ sudo gedit /etc/passwd & because this would put sudo in background ! Using gksudo as demonstrated, would popup a gui sudo window. May be this is a common knowledge, but not knowing this frustrated me during my newbie year.

sort ugly text
Often, when sorting you want the sort to ignore extraneous characters. The b, d, and f tell sort to ignore leading blanks, use 'dictionary order' (ignore punctuation), and ignore (fold) case. Add a "u" if you only want one copy of duplicate lines. This is a great command to use within vim to sort lines of text, using !}sort -bdf

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command

Debug a remote php application (behind firewall) using ssh tunnel for XDEBUG port 9000
If you need to xdebug a remote php application, which is behind a firewall, and you have an ssh daemon running on that machine. you can redirect port 9000 on that machine over to your local machine from which you run your xdebug client (I am using phpStorm) So, run this command on your local machine and start your local xdebug client, to start debugging. more info: http://code.google.com/p/spectator/wiki/Installing

Recursivly search current directory for files larger than 100MB

The wisdom of Cave Johnson
There's been a similar Futurama thing around for a while, which grabs a quote from the /. headers [curl -Ism3 slashdot.org | egrep "^X-(F|B|L)" | cut -d \- -f 2- | fmt -w $(tput cols)]. Same deal, but more likely to stop working when someone forgets to pay the bill on the domain. Until then: Cave Johnson!

Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
This will indent the input to be more readable. Warnings and messages are not send to STDOUT so you can just use a pipe to create the formatted outputfile, like: $ tidy -i -xml in.xml > out.xml

ls -hog --> a more compact ls -l
I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog'


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