CDPATH tells the cd command to look in this colon-separated list of directories for your destination. My preferred order are 1) the current directory, specified by the empty string between the = and the first colon, 2) the parent directory (so that I can cd lib instead of cd ../lib), 3) my home directory, and 4) my ~/projects directory.

Watch the number of packets/bytes coming through the firewall. Useful in setting up new iptables rules or chains. Use this output to reorder rules for efficiency.

I had a hard time in finding the correct settings to get reasonable output from a coin selector which sends its data over a serial line. In the end, minicom came to the rescue and pointed me on the right track.

So, if you need to do something similar, these settings may help you.

Replace ttyUSB0 with your device file, 9600 with your baud rate, 5 with your read timeout (10ths of a second), and 1 with the minimum numbers of characters you want to read.

You can then open the device file like you are used to do, example:

Replace the words between BEGIN and END.

Particularly useful if you're mounting different drives, using the following command will allow you to see all the filesystems currently mounted on your computer and their respective specs with the added benefit of nice formatting.

When typing out long arguments, such as:

You can put that argument on your command line by holding down the ALT key and pressing the period '.' or by pressing <ESC> then the period '.'. For example:

would put '/var/www/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ as my argument. Keeping pressing 'ALT+.' to cycle through arguments of your commands starting from most recent to oldest. This can save a ton of typing.

Just type 'opened' and get all files currently opened for edit.

By 'pst' you can print out process tree with all details about all processes (including a command line, PID, and the current process you are running in).

By 'pst username' you can get an information about processes belonging to the particular user 'username'.

Alias two dots to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file.

It helps you save a lot of writing :-)

I think it would be wise if anyone voting down left a comment indicating the reason for that action. Don't keep it to yourself. Thanks.

The output of "echo $PATH" is hard to read, this is much easier. The parentheses ensure that the change to the input field separator (IFS) only happens the the sub shell and not affecting the current shell.

On my music directory, I create variable that contains all mp3s files, then I play them with mpg123. -C options enable terminal control key, s for stop, p for pause, f for forward to next song.

I am new to linux, and I was trying to figure out why I could not sudo with my username in Fedora 10. This command, when run as root, will add a line to the sudoers file allowing the loginname supplied to sudo. The above line will require a password when you sudo, if you wish to sudo without password, use:

echo 'loginname ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

instead. you have to run this command as su, and this is just an easier way of using visudo, just adds it right from the terminal.

Mandriva Linux includes a security tool called "msec" (configurable via "draksec").

One of the many things it regularily checks for is world writeable files.

If any are found, it writes the list to /var/log/security/writable.today.

"wc -l" simply counts the number of lines in the file.

This number should be low.

Browse through /var/log/security/writable.today and consider if any of those files *need* to be world-writeable (and if not, modify the permissions. eg: "chmod o-w $file").

A large number of world-writeable files may indicate that umask is not correctly set in /etc/profile (or ${HOME}/.bash_profile) but could also indicate poor security configuration or even malicious activity.

prerequisite:

It colors the machine name and current directory different colors for easy viewing.