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,

This will make your bash scripts better!!

process-getopt is a wrapper around getopt(1) for bash that lets you define command line options (eg -h, --help) and descriptions through a single function call. These definitions are then used in runtime processing of command line options as well as in generating help and man pages. It also saves a little time in coding and in producing nicely formatted documentation. It is quite similar to GNU's argp in glibc for compiled languages and OptionParse for python.

See: Linux Gazette article 162: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/162/hepple.html,

http://sourceforge.net/projects/process-getopt, http://bhepple.freeshell.org/oddmuse/wiki.cgi/process-getopt

My version uses printf and command substitution ($()) instead of echo -e and xargs, this is a few less chars, but not real substantive difference.

Also supports lowercase hex letters and a backslash (\) will make it through unescaped

Convert some decimal numbers to binary numbers. You could also build a general base-converter:

then you could write

as unixmonkey7109 pointed out, first awk parse replaces three steps.

It's not a big line, and it *may not* work for everybody, I guess it depends on the detail of access_log configuration in your httpd.conf. I use it as a prerotate command for logrotate in httpd section so it executes before access_log rotation, everyday at midnight.

This command creates and burns a gapless audio CD with 99 tracks. Each track is a 30 second sine wave, the first is 1 Hz, the second 2 Hz, and so on, up to 99 Hz. This is useful for testing audio systems (how low can your bass go?) and for creating the constant vibrations needed to make non-Newtonian fluids (like cornstarch and water) crawl around.

Note, this temporarily creates 500MB of .cdda files in the current directory. If you don't use the "rm" at the end of the command, you can burn more disks using

Prerequisites: a blank CD-R in /dev/cdrw, sox (http://sox.sourceforge.net/), and cdrdao (http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/). I'm also assuming a recent version of bash for the brace expansion (which just looks nicer than using seq(1), but isn't necessary).

This bash function uses albumart.org to find the cover for an album. It returns an amazon.com url to the image.

Usage: albumart [artist] [album]

These arguments can be reversed and if the album name is distinct enough, it may be possible to omit the artist.

The command can be extended with wget to automatically download the matching image like this:

An easy function to get a process tree listing (very detailed) for all the processes of any gived user.

This function is also in my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Watch a TiVo file on your computer.

cd to the folder containing the wav files, then convert them all to flac. yeah baby!

in ubuntu, to get the flac program just:

sudo apt-get install flac

flac file input formats are wav, aiff, raw, flac, oga and ogg

Find files recursively that were updated in the last hour ignoring SVN files and folders. Incase you do a full svn up on accident.

I've been using linux for almost a decade and only recently discovered that most terminals like putty, xterm, xfree86, vt100, etc., support hundreds of shades of colors, backgrounds and text/terminal effects.

This simply prints out a ton of them, the output is pretty amazing.

If you use non-x terminals all the time like I do, it can really be helpful to know how to tweak colors and terminal capabilities. Like:

Usage example:

Replace "-nt" with "-ot" for oldest.

Run

first to include dotfiles.

bash2 : for X in $(seq 1 5); do printf "%03g " "$X";done

bash3 : for X in {1..5}; do printf "%03g " "$X";done

bash4 : echo {001..5}

Usage:

I often need to cd where no man wants to go (i.e. long path). by enabling the shell option cdable_vars, I can tell cd to assume the destination is the name of a variable.

Get your server's fingerprints to give to users to verify when they ssh in. Publickey locations may vary by distro. Fingerprints should be provided out-of-band.

Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

If you omit the function name, the command will display all definitions

If you issue the "set" command, you'll see a list of variables and functions. This command displays just those functions' names.

I often need to extract a function from a bash script and this command will do it.

Really useful way to combine less and grep while browsing log files.

I can't figure out how to make it into a true oneliner so paste it into a script file called lgrep:

Usage:

lgrep searchfor file1 [file2 file3]

Advanced example (grep for an Exception in logfiles that starts with qc):

lgrep Exception $(find . -name "qc*.log")

For example, if you are the type who type ls very often, then

will ls after every command you issue.