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Display calendar with specific national holidays and week numbers
NB when you run this gcal command in your shell, holidays are highlighted but this highlighting does not show in the sample output (above). To find full details on gcal options: gcal --long-help | less Example for United States, Pennsylvania: gcal -K -q US_PA 2009 # display holidays in USA/Pennsylvania for 2009 (with week numbers) Example for Hong Kong: gcal -K -q HK 2009 # display holidays in Hong Kong for 2009 (with week numbers)

Deal with dot files safely

Minimize active window
Bind it to some shortcut key, using something like xbindkeys-config (if you do not have xbindkeys: apt-get install xbindkeys xbindkeys-config)

Monitor a file's size
use "watch" instead of while-loops in these simple cases

Show which programs are listening on TCP and UDP ports
-p Tell me the name of the program and it's PID -l that is listening -u on a UDP port. -n Give me numeric IP addresses (don't resolve them) -t oh, also TCP ports

send tweets to twitter (and get user details)
great for outputting tweets from cron jobs and batch scripts

Alias to securely run X from tty and close that tty afterwards.
There are different ways to run X, I prefer to run it without xdm/gdm. The problem is you can't lock X because one can press Ctrl+Alt+F1, press Ctrl+Z and kill you X locking process. Of course you can disable Ctrl+Alt* or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace keys, but it's inconvinient if you really need to switch into console.

Display which distro is installed

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.

get only time of execution of a command without his output


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