If you need to keep an eye on a command whose output is changing, use the watch command. For example, to keep an eye on your load average

If you launch gnome-terminal manually, you can start with three open tabs

checkfor: have the shell check anything you're waiting for.

'while : ; do' is an infinite loop

'$*' executes the command passed in

'sleep 5' - change for your tastes, sleep for 5 seconds

bash, ksh, likely sh, maybe zsh

Ctrl-c to break the loop

For example: check the APT security keys to make sure the Google digital signature was imported correctly

You can view the man pages from section five by passing the section number as an argument to the man command

fcd : file change directory

A bash function that takes a fully qualified file path and cd's into the directory where it lives. Useful on the commadline when you have a file name in a variable and you'd like to cd to the directory to RCS check it in or look at other files associated with it.

Will run on any ksh, bash, likely sh, maybe zsh.

Make sure that find does not touch anything other than regular files, and handles non-standard characters in filenames while passing to xargs.

Sends both stdout and stderr to the pipe which captures the data in the file 'out.test' and sends to stdout of tee (likely /dev/tty unless redirected). Works on Bourne, Korn and Bash shells.

needs no GNU tools, as far as I see it

saves one command. Needs GNU grep though :-(

The grep switches eliminate the need for awk and sed. Modifying vim with -p will show all files in separate tabs, -o in separate vim windows. Just wish it didn't hose my terminal once I exit vim!!

This will drop you into vim to edit all files that contain your grep string.

Next time you see a mac fanboy bragging about 64-bitness of 10.6 give him this so he might sh?

biggest->small directories, then biggest->smallest files

another possibility

Show time and date when you installed your OS.

using awk

missed the last char thanks @Josay

Can change language and speed, see espeak man page for options. (Install espeak in your linux distro via yum or apt-get)

For insomniacs you may need to enclose in a while true; do ...; done loop ;)

use manpages, they give you "ultimate commands"

"ls -SshF --color" list by filesize (biggest at the top)

"ls -SshFr --color" list by filesize in reverse order (biggest at the bottom)

adding users to groups on OS X is not a straightforward process, you need to use the new in built in Directory Service command line utility...

Sorts a character string, using common shell commands.