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Check if *hardware* is 32bit or 64bit
This command tell you if your hardware is 32 or 64 bits even if you install a 32bits OS on a 64 bits hardware. If your distro don't support the -q switch, try doing : $ grep &>/dev/null '\' /proc/cpuinfo && echo 64 bits || echo 32 bits

Show changed files, ignoring permission, date and whitespace changes
Only shows files with actual changes to text (excluding whitespace). Useful if you've messed up permissions or transferred in files from windows or something like that, so that you can get a list of changed files, and clean up the rest.

Display kernel profile of currently executing functions in Solaris.
Lockstat will sample the kernel 977 times per second, and print out the functions that it sees executing on the CPU during the sample. The -s 10 switch tells lockstsat to not only print that function, but also show the call stack (up to 10 deep).

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format

Show latest changed files

du with colored bar graph
i'm using gawk, you may get varying mileage with other varieties. You might want to change the / after du to say, /home/ or /var or something, otherwise this command might take quite some time to complete. Sorry it's so obsfucated, I had to turn a script into a one-liner under 255 characters for commandlinefu. Note: the bar ratio is relative, so the highest ratio of the total disk, "anchors" the rest of the graph. EDIT: the math was slightly wrong, fixed it. Also, made it compliant with older versions of df.

detach remote console for long running operations
Starts midnightcommander and allows you to detach the console; use ctrl-\ to detach Then at a later time you can reconnect using $ dtach -a /tmp/wires-mc In my experience dtach works much better for programs like irssi, mutt, mc, aptitude than screen does.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

record the input of your sound card into ogg file
save the input into a ogg file


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