If the remote doesn't export its desktop (eg fluxbox, blackbox etc) then you need to run a x11vnc server there and a vncviewer at the local end. This command does the lot for you - it assumes that you can 'ssh' to the box without a password and that x11vnc is installed at the remote end.

The above code is just an example of printing on the same line, hit Ctrl + C to stop

When using echo -ne "something\r", echo will:

- print "something"

- dont print a new line (-n)

- interpret \r as carriage return, going back to the start of the line (-e)

Remember to print some white spaces after the output if your command will print lines of different sizes, mainly if one line will be smaller than the previous

Edit from reading comments: You can achieve the same effect using printf (more standardized than echo): while true; do printf "%-80s\r" "$(date)"; sleep 1; done

Stops when the (last) dd process exits.

Strip my code to:

wmctrl -o 0,0 # autorotates to the first face. In fact [0-1279],0

wmctrl - 1280,0 # goes to the second face

wmctrl -o 2560,0 # goes to the third face, and so on.

# Use multiples of the horizontal display resolution.

My example work for 1280x800 display, been 1280 the number of interest.

Tweak the number, try a biiiig one and see your cube spinning...

I put a complex example to show how fun things can be, even for my ademco and paradox alarm central network advisor interface xpto etc. It rotates two faces, print the alarm message, and goes back tho where it was.

Tested on BIGLINUX 4.2, equivalent to ubuntu LTS hardy.

Do not forget to activate 3D efects ( compiz cube )

This will record the Alexa Traffic Stats to a file and run every 5 hours.

-- www.fir3net.com --

Remounts a usb disk /dev/sdb, without having to physically remove and reinsert. (Gnome desktop)

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.

Very useful for interactive scripts where you would like to return the terminal contents to its original state before the script was run. This would be similar to how vi exits and returns you to your original terminal screen.

Save and clear the terminal contents with:

Execute some commands, then restore the saved terminal contents with:

Mostly for Norwegians, but easily adoptable to others. Very handy if you are brainstorming for a new domainname.

Will only display the available ones..

You can usually do this better with dig, but if you dont have dig, or the TLD only have an online service to check with, this will be usefull..

A little bash daemon

Log a command's votes,

then run:

Very useful in shell scripts because you can run a task nicely in the background using job-control and output progress until it completes.

Here's an example of how I use it in backup scripts to run gpg in the background to encrypt an archive file (which I create in this same way). $! is the process ID of the last run command, which is saved here as the variable PI, then sleeper is called with the process id of the gpg task (PI), and sleeper is also specified to output : instead of the default . every 3 seconds instead of the default 1. So a shorter version would be sleeper $!;

The wait is also used here, though it may not be needed on your system.

Previously to get around the $! not always being available, I would instead check for the existance of the process ID by checking if the directory /proc/$PID existed, but not everyone uses proc anymore. That version is currently the one at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html but I plan on upgrading to this new version soon.

This will log your internet download speed.

You can run

to get a graph of it.

Get sopcast links for live sports from http://myp2p.eu (for example)

Get sp-sc or sp-auth binary by googling (sopcast + linux)

eg http://www.jbg.f2s.com/sp-sc.gz

Requires the 32bit libstdc++5 package.

After exiting mplayer, type 'killall sp-sc'

[Note: This command needs to be run as root].

If you are downloading something large at night, you can start wget as a normal user and issue the above command as root. When the download is done, the computer will automatically go to sleep. If at any time you feel the computer should not go to sleep automatically(like if you find the download still continuing in the morning), just create an empty file called nosleep in /tmp directory.

Rainbow, instead of greys

I wanted to keep a backup of my company database server on my local homeserver. After I found maatkit to sync databases, everything except security seemed fine. SSH takes care of that part.

checkfor: have the shell check anything you're waiting for.

'while : ; do' is an infinite loop

'$*' executes the command passed in

'sleep 5' - change for your tastes, sleep for 5 seconds

bash, ksh, likely sh, maybe zsh

Ctrl-c to break the loop

doesn't require "at", change the "2h" to whatever you want... (deafult unit for sleep is seconds)

#Usage: watch timeinsecond "command"

Ummmm.. Saw that gem on some dead-head hippies VW bus at phish this summer.. It's actually one of my favorite ways of using bash, very clean. It shows what you can do with the cool advanced features like job control, redirection, combining commands that don't wait for each other, and the thing I like the most is the use of the ( ) to make this process heirarchy below, which comes in very handy when using fifos for adding optimization to your scripts or commands with similar acrobatics.

F UID PID PPID WCHAN RSS PSR CMD

1 gplovr 30667 1 wait 1324 1 -bash

0 gplovr 30672 30667 - 516 3 \_ sleep 3

1 gplovr 30669 1 wait 1324 1 -bash

0 gplovr 30673 30669 - 516 0 \_ sleep 5

1 gplovr 30671 1 wait 1324 1 -bash

0 gplovr 30674 30671 - 516 1 \_ sleep 7

the command for the impatient sysadmin: simply checks every five secs, if a host or a specific service running on it is up. ideal for hosts that are configured not to respond on pings.

This command produces the output of "du -sk testfile" in every 10 seconds. You can change the command to be whatever you want.