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Track X Window events in chosen window
After executing this, click on a window you want to track X Window events in. Explaination: "xev will track events in the window with the following -id, which we get by greping window information obtained by xwininfo"

Email yourself after a job is done
This is a two part command that comes in really handy if you're running commands that take longer than you're willing to wait. The commands are separated by the semicolon(;) The first command is whatever you're attempting to do. The second commands emails you after the job completes.

Use colordiff in side-by-side mode, and with automatic column widths.
Barely worth posting because it is so simple, but I use it literally all the time. I was always frustrated by the limitations that a non-gui environment imposes on diff'ing files. This fixes some of those limitations by colourising the output (you'll have to install colordiff, but it is just a wrapper for diff itself), using side-by-side mode for clearer presentation, and of course, the -W parameter, using tput to automatically insert you terminal width. Note that the double quotes aren't necessary if typed into terminal as-is. I included them for safety sake,

Annotate tail -f with timestamps
Uses the command ts in order to add a timestamp on each line. This command is provided in the moreutils package on Debian, and you may need libtime-duration-perl to be able to format the date.

easily find megabyte eating files or directories
sorts the files by integer megabytes, which should be enough to (interactively) find the space wasters. Now you can $ dush for the above output, $ dush -n 3 for only the 3 biggest files and so on. It's always a good idea to have this line in your .profile or .bashrc

Perl Command Line Interpreter
My Programming Languages professor assigned my class a homework assignment where we had to write a Perl interpreter using Perl. I really like Python's interactive command line interpreter which inspired this Perl script.

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

Add a line to a file using sudo
This is the solution to the common mistake made by sudo newbies, since $ sudo echo "foo bar" >> /path/to/some/file does NOT add to the file as root. Alternatively, $ sudo echo "foo bar" > /path/to/some/file should be replaced by $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee /path/to/some/file And you can add a >/dev/null in the end if you're not interested in the tee stdout : $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee -a /path/to/some/file >/dev/null

Find files with lines that do not match a pattern
This one would be much faster, as it's only one executed command.

Follow the most recently updated log files
This command finds the 5 (-n5) most frequently updated logs in /var/log, and then does a multifile tail follow of those log files. Alternately, you can do this to follow a specific list of log files: sudo tail -n0 -f /var/log/{messages,secure,cron,cups/error_log}


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