Commands using sleep

You can use this to loop any command to periodically see the output.

Alternatively, you can put it in a simple shell script to save typing!

#/!bin/bash

while true; do $1; sleep $2; done;

pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable.

Basically the opposite of:

which would beep when a server IS reachable.

You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a:

which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo.

Notes:

Requires beep package.

May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker)

Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box...

See man vmstat for information about the statistics.

This does the same thing without the timestamp:

Handy if all you have is a console session or tty.

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).

command to turn off your computer when you go home and can not wait

Listen to different voices in the system--useful for picking the voice you like

This runs a command continuously, restarting it if it exits. Sort of a poor man's daemontools. Useful for running servers from the command line instead of inittab.

Pump up the chatter, run this script on a regular basis to listen to your twitter timeline.

This is a rough first cut using several cli clips I have spotted around. There is no facility to not read those things already read to you. This could also easily be put in a loop for timed onslaught from the chatterverse, though I think it might violate several pointsof the Geneva Convention

UPDATE - added a loop, only reads the first 6 twits, and does this every 5 mins.

wrapping the snippet in $( )& puts the whole thing in the background so you don't tie up your login session.

Countdown from 10 or whatever you want:)

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

plays wave file after 3 minutes

This will ring the system bell once if your script exits successfully and twice if it fails. So you can go look at something else and it will alert you when done. Don't forget to use 'xset b [vol [pitch [duration]]]' to get the bell to sound the way you want.

just for fun