Random choose numbers from 1 to 100 with 5 seconds interval without duplicates. Show Sample Output

Waits for all pings to complete and returns ip with mac address

alternatively, run the spinner for 5 seconds: timeout 5 bash -c 'spinner=( Ooooo oOooo ooOoo oooOo ooooO oooOo ooOoo oOooo); while true; do for i in ${spinner[@]}; do for j in seq 0 ${#i}; do echo -en "\b\b"; done; echo -ne "${i}"; sleep 0.2; done; done' Show Sample Output

This loop will finish if a file hasn't changed in the last 10 seconds. . It checks the file's modification timestamp against the clock. If 10 seconds have elapsed without any change to the file, then the loop ends. . This script will give a false positive if there's a 10 second delay between updates, e.g. due to network congestion . How does it work? 'date +%s' gives the current time in seconds 'stat -c %Y' gives the file's last modification time in seconds '$(( ))' is bash's way of doing maths '[ X -lt 10 ]' tests the result is Less Than 10 otherwise sleep for 1 second and repeat . Note: Clever as this script is, inotify is smarter. Show Sample Output

This one-liner fills the screen with randomly colored lines.

watch the seconds of your life tick away - replace YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:ss w/ your birthtime.

Lockstat will sample the kernel 977 times per second, and print out the functions that it sees executing on the CPU during the sample. The -s 10 switch tells lockstsat to not only print that function, but also show the call stack (up to 10 deep). Show Sample Output

Change your wallpaper every thirty minutes (or however long you like, I suppose) to a randomly selected image in a directory and subdirectories. Bear in mind this is not safe to use if anyone else has write access to your image directory.

Same as above but slooooow it down

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.

You can use this one-liner for a quick and dirty (more customizable) alternative to the watch command. The keys to making this work: everything exists in an infinite loop; the loop starts with a clear; the loop ends with a sleep. Enter whatever you'd like to keep an eye on in the middle. Show Sample Output

usage examples ls largedir |rd lynx -dump largewebsite.com |rd rd < largelogfile

Cycles continuously through a string printing each character with a random delay less than 1 second. First parameter is min, 2nd is max. Example: 1 3 means sleep random .1 to .3. Experiment with different values. The 3rd parameter is the string. The sleep will help with battery life/power consumption. cycle 1 3 $(openssl rand 100 | xxd -p) Fans of "The Shining" might get a kick out of this: cycle 1 4 ' All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'

Only slightly different than previous commands. The benefit is that your "watch" should die when the dd command has completed. (Of course this would depend on /proc being available)

works best in a shell script run at startup. It will ping localhost once and output to null, after it does that, acpi is called for temperature in fahrenheit and piped through to another loop that feeds notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over. Show Sample Output

this will open a new tab in firefox for every line in a file the sleep is removable but i found that if you have a large list of urls 50+, and no sleep, it will try to open all the urls at once and this will cause them all to load a lot slower, also depending on the ram of your system sleep gives you a chance to close the tabs before they overload your ram, removing & >2/dev/null will yield unpredictable results.

combination of several of the above

pauses exactly long enough to wake at the top of the hour

rather don't depend on those sleepin'pills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_sheep

for OS X

Moves the mouse 1 pixel down and to the right, then immediately back again, every 4 minutes. This keeps screensavers from turning on. I have used this extensively and I've never even noticed the mouse movement because it is so subtle.