Commands tagged /dev/null

Run the alias command, then issue

and resize your terminal window (putty/console/hyperterm/xterm/etc) then issue the same command and you'll understand.

Insructs the shell that if LINES is not set or null to use the output from `tput lines` ( ncurses based terminal access ) to get the number of lines in your terminal. But furthermore, in case that doesn't work either, it will default to using the deafault of 12 (-2 = 10).

The default for HEAD is to output the first 10 lines, this alias changes the default to output the first x lines instead, where x is the number of lines currently displayed on your terminal - 2. The -2 is there so that the top line displayed is the command you ran that used HEAD, ie the prompt.

Depending on whether your PS1 and/or PROMPT_COMMAND output more than 1 line (mine is 3) you will want to increase from -2. So with my prompt being the following, I need -7, or - 5 if I only want to display the commandline at the top. ( http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html )

275MB/748MB

[7995:7993 - 0:186] 06:26:49 Thu Apr 08 [askapache@n1-backbone5:/dev/pts/0 +1] ~

In most shells the LINES variable is created automatically at login and updated when the terminal is resized (28 linux, 23/20 others for SIGWINCH) to contain the number of vertical lines that can fit in your terminal window. Because the alias doesn't hard-code the current LINES but relys on the $LINES variable, this is a dynamic alias that will always work on a tty device.

connects to host via ssh and displays the live transfer speed, directing all transferred data to /dev/null

needs pv installed

Debian: 'apt-get install pv'

Fedora: 'yum install pv' (may need the 'extras' repository enabled)

Check out the usage of 'trap', you may not have seen this one much. This command provides a way to schedule commands at certain times by running them after sleep finishes sleeping. In the example 'sleep 2h' sleeps for 2 hours. What is cool about this command is that it uses the 'trap' builtin bash command to remove the SIGHUP trap that normally exits all processes started by the shell upon logout. The 'trap 1' command then restores the normal SIGHUP behaviour.

It also uses the 'nice -n 19' command which causes the sleep process to be run with minimal CPU.

Further, it runs all the commands within the 2nd parentheses in the background. This is sweet cuz you can fire off as many of these as you want. Very helpful for shell scripts.