This creates a bash function `take` that you can call with the name of the directory as the first parameter. Add the function to ~/.bashrc to have it available anytime. Show Sample Output

This is a equivalent to the GNU ' readlink' tool, but it supports following all the links, even in different directories. An interesting alternative is this one, that gets the path of the destination file myreadlink() { [ ! -h "$1" ] && echo "$1" || (local link="$(expr "$(command ls -ld -- "$1")" : '.*-> \(.*\)$')"; cd $(dirname $1); myreadlink "$link" | sed "s|^\([^/].*\)\$|$(dirname $1)/\1|"); } Show Sample Output

I was surprised to find that with RedHat bash, I could not find any comment lines (begining with #) in my bash shell history. Surprised because in Mageia Linux this works. It turns out that RedHat's bash will keep comment lines if in my .bashrc, I define: export HISTIGNORE=' cd "`*: PROMPT_COMMAND=?*?' Why have comment lines in shell history? It's a handy and convenient way to make proto-commands (to be completed later) and for storing brief text data that is searchable in shell history. Show Sample Output

Pros: Works in all Windows computers, most updated and compatible command. Cons: 3 liner Replace fcisolutions.com with your site name.

switch to previous directory or toggle

You can also remove the "&& pwd" if you don't want it to print out each directory as it moves up. Show Sample Output

Copy changed files from remote git repository, _including binary ones_, staged and unstaged alike. Note that this command doesn't handle deleted files properly.

Generate a truly random password using noise from your microphone to seed the RNG. This will spit out 12 password with 12 characters each, but you can save this into a bash script and replace 'pwgen -ys 12 12' with 'pwgen $@' so you can pass any paramters to pwgen as you would normally do. Show Sample Output

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Not really alternative, just giving a different behavior listing current directory if no directory given.

Rather than complicated and fragile paths relative to a script like "../../other", this command will retrieve the full path of the file's repository head. Safe with spaces in directory names. Works within a symlinked directory. Broken down: cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" temporarily changes directories within this expansion. Double quoted "$(dirname" and ")" with unquoted ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} allows spaces in the path. git rev-parse --show-toplevel gets the full path of the repository head of the current working directory, which was temporarily changed by the "cd".

Sony's Xperia camera app creates files without time-stamped names. Thus, after deleting files on the phone, the same names will be reused. When uploading the photos to a cloud storage, this means that files will be overwritten. Running this command after every sync of uploaded photos with the computer prevents this. Show Sample Output

I find this handy for linking all the bin files in a package to /usr/bin or all the man files to /usr/share/man. You can replace * with */* to operate on all the files in subdirectories.

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Copy data to the destination using commands such as cpio (recommended), tar, rsync, ufsdump, or ufsrestore. Example: Let the source directory be /source, and let the destination directory be /destination. # cd /source # cd .. # find ./source -depth -print | cpio -cvo> /destination/source_data.cpio # cd /destination # cpio -icvmdI ./source_data.cpio # rm -rf ./source_data.cpio

ec commits changes to etckeeper must have etckeeper installed with bzr to use this place inside bashrc can be used from any directory to commit changes

Using a GUI file managers you can merge directories (cut and paste). This command roughly does the same (it doesn't ask for confirmation (no problem for me) and it doesn't clean up the empty SRC directories (no problem, trivial). probably does the same: cp -l SRC TARGET; rm -rf SRC

gitstart ~/path/to/dir Initialized empty Git repository in /home/user/path/to/dir/.git/

Can easily be scripted in order to show permission "tree" from any folder. Can also be formated with column -t { pushd .> /dev/null; cd /; for d in `echo $OLDPWD | sed -e 's/\// /g'`; do cd $d; echo -n "$d "; ls -ld .; done; popd >/dev/null ; } | column -t from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3731/using-column-to-format-a-directory-listing Show Sample Output

traverses e.g. "/data/myhost1.com/myrsyncshare"; logs stderr and stdout. useful with cron.

First use ls -i to list files and directories with their inode number Then if you want to change to one of the directories, replace inode_no with its inode then execute the command Show Sample Output

Avoid clobbering files by either overwriting due to name collisions or by assuming the command worked and deleting the target directory.