Reduce the number of keystrokes it takes to open a file in vim. First of all, you just need to type "v", which is less than half the number of characters (!), and second-of-all, you only need to enter a substring of the file you want to open. For example, if you want to open the file, homework.txt, then type "v hom" to open it. Good tip is to use the lowest unique substring, otherwise you'll open multiple files in different buffers (which is sometimes desirable). Use Ctrl-^ to switch between buffers.

This example, for example, produces the output, "Fri Feb 13 15:26:30 EST 2009"

Have a grudge against someone on your network? Do a "find -writable" in their directory and see what you can vandalize! But seriously, this is really useful to check the files in your own home directory to make sure they can't inadvertently be changed by someone else's wayward script.

Info has some of the worst keybindings I've ever seen. Being a vim user, I attribute that to emacs influence. Use the --vi-keys option to use some of the vi keybindings, although this won't change all the keybindings. Use the "infokey" program to have more control over info keybindings.

Although less behaves more or less like vim in certain aspects, the vim regex for word boundaries (\< and \>) do not work in less. Instead, use \b to denote a word boundary. Therefore, if you want to search for, say, the word "exit", but do not want to search for exiting, exits, etc., then surround "exit" with \b. This is useful if you need to search for specific occurrences of a keyword or command. \b can also be used at just the beginning and end, if needed.

Ever since the switch to pulseaudio, Ubuntu users including myself have found themselves with no sound intermittently. To fix this, just use this command and restarts firefox or mplayer or whatever.

This example uses the -exec option to move all matching files into a backup directory

Converts windows lined-style file to unix.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

Can be used to convert from linux2dos : just invert \r\n and \n.

Lists the local files that are not present in the remote repository (lines beginning with ?)

and add them.

creates a tar.gz with a name like:

backup20090410_173053.tar.gz

of a given directory.

this file was made 10 April 2009 at 5:30:53pm

see date's man page to customize the timestamp format

A bash function might also be useful:

Or if you want less verbose output:

Usage:

Declare this function in your Shell, then use it like this:

The script will search for the 'foo' pattern in your current xmms2 playlist (artist or songname), and play the first occurence of it !

I have often file like this

01 - file.file

02 - file.file

03 - file.file

I rename all with this command

for f in * ; do mv -- "$f" "${f/[0-9][0-9] \- /}" ; done

then it looks like this

file.file

file.file

file.file

etc

The report mode of mtr produces a text formated result of the mtr run using the number of ping cycles stated by the command. This text file could then be attached to an email with ease.

I use this also without the ">" portion when writing email from within mutt using VI from the command mode with ":r !mtr --report --report-cycles 10

Get the svn info, grep for the "URL" of the repository, pull out the tag/branch/trunk, and then just show the helpful/meaningful bit.

On Ubuntu, the default editor for visudo is nano. To change the editor to something else (e.g., vi) use this command.

Linux : these script enable you to edit multiple files and remove exact phrase from multiple files

Nicely display permissions in octal format and filename for a given directory

Execute a command on shell logout,and run it until is finished,then shell is closed.