Manpages, command summaries, and pretty much everything else usually have the information you're most likely to want at the beginning. Seeing just the last 40 or so lines of options from a command that has 100 is not super useful, and having to scroll up each time you want to glance at something is spastic.

Run this and then do something like

and you'll get the first screen(-mostly-)full of vi's usage info and options list

Then use

to page down, and

to page up.

To see the current page again:

Also useful for situations like

where you're using readline up-arrow, HOME, END, etc., to quickly recall commented commands.

For the unaware, that option to aptitude search will bring up all of the packages whose descriptions contain the string "smorgasbord". Depending on your distro, there could potentially be hundreds of them.

Displays a scrolling banner which loops until you hit Ctrl-C to terminate it.

Make sure you finish your banner message with a space so it will loop nicely.

If you have some drive imaging to do, you can boot into any liveCD and use a commodity machine. The drives will be written in parallel.

To improve efficiency, specify a larger block size in dd:

To image more drives , insert them as additional arguments to tee:

Hi glaudiston, you can save a few chars by leaving out cat and pipe and still enjoy the added flexibility.

Execute this in the root of your music library and this recurses through the directories and normalizes each folder containing mp3s as a batch. This assumes those folders hold an album each. The command "normalize-audio" may go by "normalize" on some systems.

This version uses host and no ruby.

If you are interested in interfaces other than eth0 you will need to change eth0 to your interface name.

You could use this mammoth to nab the ip4 addresses of all your interfaces

perl -e '@_=`ifconfig -a`; sort(@_); foreach(@_) { /(inet addr\:)(\d+.\d+.\d+.\d+ )/; $_=$2; @uniq=grep($_ ne $prev && (($prev) = $_), @_);} print join "\n",@uniq,"\n"; '

it seems silly to have all this code when the following will work fine

ifconfig -a | grep "inet " | awk -F":" ' { print $2 } ' | cut -d " " -f1

Same thing just a different way to get there. You will need lynx

You can use [n]> combined with >(cmd) to attach the various output file descriptors to be the input of different commands.

if you still get a permissions error using sudo, then nano the file:

sudo nano -w /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational

and change 1 to 0

this thread:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=369836&postcount=15

says that this will "help the block layer to optimize a few decisions"

The iostat command is used for monitoring system input/output device loading by observing the time the devices are active in relation to their average transfer rates.

in ubuntu to get the iostat program do this:

sudo apt-get install sysstat

i found this command here:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54379

This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic.

To get a random xkcd comic, I also use the following:

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.