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list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Retrieve a list of all webpages on a site
This spiders the given site without downloading the HTML content. The resulting directory structure is then parsed to output a list of the URLs to url-list.txt. Note that this can take a long time to run and you make want to throttle the spidering so as to play nicely.

rsync over ssh via non-default ssh port
tested on cygwin and Fedora 9 . good to remember for those jobs where you cannot set a site-specific connect option in your ~/.ssh/config file.

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Use find to get around Argument list too long problem
Can be used for other commands as well, replace rm with ls. It is easy to make this shorter but if the filenames involved have spaces, you will need to do use find's "-print0" option in conjunction with xargs's "-0" option. Otherwise the shell that xargs uses to execute the "rm" command line will treat the space as a token separator, thereby treating the name as two (or more) names.

List the Sizes of Folders and Directories
I wanted an easy way to list out the sizes of directories and all of the contents of those directories recursively.

Isolate file name from full path/find output
Quick method of isolating filenames from a full path using expansion. Much quicker than using "basename"

Print all 256 colors for testing TERM or for a quick reference
This is super fast and an easy way to test your terminal for 256 color support. Unlike alot of info about changing colors in the terminal, this uses the ncurses termcap/terminfo database to determine the escape codes used to generate the colors for a specific TERM. That means you can switch your terminal and then run this to check the real output. $ tset xterm-256color at any rate that is some super lean code! Here it is in function form to stick in your .bash_profile aa_256 () { ( x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))s`; for i in {0..256}; do o=00$i; echo -e ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${y// /=}$x; done ) } From my bash_profile: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

(Debian/Ubuntu) Discover what package a file belongs to
Works similar to dpkg -S, but uses the locatedb and is thus inarguably a lot faster - if the locatedb is current.

find files beginning with filename* that do not include "string"
Inverse grep, to find files without the string


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