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Figure out what shell you're running
short, sweet, and works after sudoing a new shell.

Read aloud a text file in Ubuntu (and other Unixes with espeak installed

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

list with full path

Run TOP in Color, split 4 ways for x seconds - the ultimate ps command. Great for init scripts
One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000! $ G=$(stty -g);stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2));top -n1; stty $G;unset G Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well. # save the correct settings to G var. $ G=$(stty -g) # change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise $ stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2)) # run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least) $ top -n1 # reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself $ stty $G;unset G This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this! Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ] Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed

Labyrinth pattern
Generates labyrinth-like pattern on UTF-8 terminal in bash. For fun ;)

list files recursively by size

convert mp3 into mb4 (audiobook format)
to convert a whole directory, put all mp3 files in a for loop $ for i in $(ls *mp3); do mpg123 -s $i | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o ${i%mp3}m4b -; done

preprocess code to be posted in comments on this site
Assuming that $script contains the filename of a script you'd like to post as part of a comment on this site, this will prefix each line with '$' and pipe it into the X selection. From there just put the cursor in the right place in the comments box and middle-click. Should work pretty much anywhere with xclip installed. On debian-ish systems this is installed as part of the package "xclip".

Converting video file (.flv, .avi etc.) to .3gp
ffmpeg -i = input file name -s = set frame size, qcif=176x144 -vcodec = force video codec -r = frame-rate [default = 25] -b = bit-rate [200 kb/s] -acodec = force audio codec -ab = audio bitrate in bits/s [64k] -ac = no. of audio channels [1] -ar = audio sampling frequency [44100 Hz] optional: -sameq = use same video quality as source (implies VBR) -f = force format -y = overwrite output files


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