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Read random news on the internet
Access a random news web page on the internet. The Links browser can of course be replaced by Firefox or any modern graphical web browser.

Copy recursivelly files of specific filetypes
Copying only wmv and mpg files recursively from to

List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location
Sorted in human readable format.

Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

Unixtime
displays time in seconds since January 1, 1970 UTC

Open (in vim) all modified files in a git repository
For editing files added to the index: $ vim `git diff --name-only --cached` To edit all changed files: $ vim `git diff --name-only HEAD` To edit changed files matching glob: $ vim `git diff --name-only -- '*.html'` If the commands needs to support filenames with whitespace, it gets a bit hacky (see http://superuser.com/questions/336016/invoking-vi-through-find-xargs-breaks-my-terminal-why for the reason): $ git diff --name-only -z | xargs -0 bash -c '

Remove executable bit from all files in the current directory recursively, excluding other directories
Useful if you have copied files from an OS without a permission structure (for example, DOS) and you need to disable all executable files but want to be able to descend into your directories.

Kill all processes that listen to ports begin with 50 (50, 50x, 50xxx,...)
Run netstat as root (via sudo) to get the ID of the process listening on the desired socket. Use awk to 1) match the entry that is the listening socket, 2) matching the exact port (bounded by leading colon and end of column), 3) remove the trailing slash and process name from the last column, and finally 4) use the system(…) command to call kill to terminate the process. Two direct commands, netstat & awk, and one forked call to kill. This does kill the specific port instead of any port that starts with 50. I consider this to be safer.

Save current layout of top
'top' has fancy layout modes where you can have several windows with different things displayed. You can configure a layout and then save it with 'W'. It will then be restored every time you run top. E.g. to have two colored windows, one sorted by CPU usage, the other by memory usage, run top $ top then press the keys $ and then as you don?t want to repeat this the next time: $

Fast, built-in pipe-based data sink
This is shorter and actually much faster than >/dev/null (see sample output for timings) Plus, it looks like a disappointed face emoticon.


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