This lists the number of ogg/mp3/wav/flac files in each subdirectory of the current directory. The output can be sorted by piping it into "sort -n".

Shows all available keyboard bindings in bash. Pretty printing.

You can omit the -d to see what's inside directories. In that case, you may want -a to see dotfiles inside those directories. (Otherwise you don't need -a since you're explicitly looking at them.)

It is not the installed size in files, but the size of RPM packages.

-c will count the number of times your search matches in the file.

If a session with named the same as your username already exists, then attach to it, otherwise create it

Change the "run_command" to whatever command you want, and remove the "echo" to run it once you are happy.

-k, --keep-open will keep connection alive, and we could exclude using 'while true'

nc is such a powerful command, it could be used instead of any OS! :p

Randomly remaps the first 5 mouse buttons (left, middle, right, upscroll, downscroll) in X for some reasonably harmless trolling. Non-persistant unless added to ~/.xinitrc or similar. The 'shuf' command is present on most modern desktop distros.

To reverse use xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5"

"git grep" automatically excludes untracked files (e.g. compiler output) and files under .git directory. If no directory or file is given, it will recursively search through the current directory.

Place this in your .bashrc (or run it once) to set the `tasks` alias. Next time you enter `tasks` into a terminal, it will give you a list of all TODO and FIXME comments in the current directory and child directories, giving you a quick overview of what you still have to do!

tstouch takes two arguments: a filename containing a timestamp, and an extended regular expression with the parenthesized section matching a timestamp of the form YYYYMMDDhhmm or YYYYMMDDhhmm.ss.

It then touches the file with that timestamp.

This type of join is clearly documented in the bash manual. Only the first character of IFS is used for the delimiter.

This script can be used to download enclosed files from a RSS feed. For example, it can be used to download mp3 files from a podcasts RSS feed.

An entirely shell-based solution (should work on any bourne-style shell), more portable on relying on the rename command, the exact nature of which varies from distro to distro.

Bash's history expansion character, "!", has many features, including "!:" for choosing a specific argument (or range of arguments) from the history. The gist is any number after !: is the number of the argument you want, with !:1 being the first argument and !:0 being the command. See the sample output for a few examples. For full details search for "^HISTORY EXPANSION" in the bash(1) man page.

 Note that this version improves on the previous function in that it handles arguments that include whitespace correctly.

Simple and easy to remember, if it already exists then it just ignores it.

[Click the "show sample output" link to see how to use this keystroke.]

Meta-p is one of my all time most used and most loved features of working at the command line. It's also one that surprisingly few people know about. To use it with bash (actually in any readline application), you'll need to add a couple lines to your .inputrc then have bash reread the .inputrc using the bind command:

  I first learned about this feature in tcsh. When I switched over to bash about fifteen years ago, I had assumed I'd prefer ^R to search in reverse. Intuitively ^R seemed better since you could search for an argument instead of a command. I think that, like using a microkernel for the Hurd, it sounded so obviously right fifteen years ago, but that was only because the older way had benefits we hadn't known about.

  I think many of you who use the command line as much as I do know that we can just be thinking about what results we want and our fingers will start typing the commands needed. I assume it's some sort of parallel processing going on with the linguistic part of the brain. Unfortunately, that parallelism doesn't seem to work (at least for me) with searching the history. I realize I can save myself typing using the history shortly after my fingers have already started "speaking". But, when I hit ^R in Bash, everything I've already typed gets ignored and I have to stop and think again about what I was doing. It's a small bump in the road but it can be annoying, especially for long-time command line users. Usually M-p is exactly what I need to save myself time and trouble.

  If you use the command line a lot, please give Meta-p a try. You may be surprised how it frees your brain to process more smoothly in parallel. (Or maybe it won't. Post here and let me know either way. ☺)