Assuming you are working within a git repository, you can run the above command & see what has changed in reverse chronological order, with one commit per line. Other formatting variations to 'oneline' include 'short', 'medium', 'full', 'fuller', 'email' or 'raw'. Show Sample Output

Seems obvious, but other seemingly simple ways to use it don't work: echo !whammy and echo "!whammy" both output: -bash: !whammy: event not found and this: echo "\!whammy" outputs: \!whammy with the slash :( you can also do any combinations of quotes for a complex string: echo "It's great to be able to use a bang ("'!'") in a command"'!' outputs: It's great to be able to use a bang (!) in a command! Show Sample Output

I love CiteULike. It makes keeping a bibtex library easy and keeps all my papers in one place. However, it can be a pain when I add new entries and have to go through the procedure for downloading the new version in my browser, so I made this to grab it for me! I actually pipe it directly into a couple of SED one liners to tidy it up a bit too. Extremely useful, especially if you make a custom BibTeX script that does this first. That way you can sort a fresh BibTeX file for each new paper with no faf. To use just replace with your CiteULike user name. It doesn't download entries that you've hidden but I don't use that feature anyway.

The idea was originally stolen from Linux Journal. 'wget' pulls the debt clock and 'sed' reformats it for general consumption. Prefacing the command with 'watch' simply sets an interval - in this case every 10 seconds. Show Sample Output

See man vmstat for information about the statistics. This does the same thing without the timestamp: vmstat 5 Show Sample Output

This truncates any lines longer than 80 characters. Also useful for looking at different parts of the line, e.g. cut -b 50-100 shows columns 50 through 100.

Can be used for other commands as well, replace rm with ls. It is easy to make this shorter but if the filenames involved have spaces, you will need to do use find's "-print0" option in conjunction with xargs's "-0" option. Otherwise the shell that xargs uses to execute the "rm" command line will treat the space as a token separator, thereby treating the name as two (or more) names. Show Sample Output

say you want to reinitialize the slave database without resetting the master positions. You stop the slave, dump the master database with --master-data=2 then execute the command on the slave and wait for it to stop at the exact position of the dump. reinit the slave db and start the slave. enjoy.

Here $HOME/shots must exist and have appropriate access rights and sitecopy must be correctly set up to upload new screen shots to the remote site. Example .sitecopyrc (for illustration purposes only) site shots server ftp.example.com username user password antabakadesuka local /home/penpen/shots remote public_html/shots permissions ignore The command uses scrot to create a screen shot, moves it to the screen shot directory, uploads it using screen uses xsel to copy the URL to the paste buffer (so that you can paste it with a middle click) and finally uses feh to display a preview of the screen shot. Note that $BASE stands for the base URL for the screen shots on the remote server, replace it by the actual location; in the example http://www.example.com/~user/shots would be fitting. Assign this command to a key combination or an icon in whatever panel you use. Show Sample Output

A web server using $HOME/public_html as user directory is required, $HOME/public_html/shots must exist and have appropriate access rights and $HOSTNAME must be known to and accessible from the outside world. The command uses scrot to create a screen shot, moves it to the screen shot directory, uses xsel to copy the URL to the paste buffer (so that you can paste it with a middle click) and finally uses feh to display a preview of the screen shot. Assign this command to a key combination or an icon in whatever panel you use.

Generate the iso from the disk, easily. same as "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=~/mydisk.iso"

xclip -o > /tmp/spell.tmp # Copy clipboard contents to a temp file aspell check /tmp/spell.tmp # Run aspell on that file cat /tmp/spell.tmp | xclip # Copy the results back to the clipboard, so that you can paste the corrected text I'm not sure xclip is installed in most distributions. If not, you can install x11-apps package

If you enable multiuser, then you can permit others to share your screen session. The following conditions apply: 1. screen must be suid root; 2. "multiuser on" must be configured in ~/.screenrc; 3. control the others user(s) access with "aclchg": # ----- from ~/.screenrc-users ----- aclchg someuser +rx "#?" #enable r/o access to "someuser" aclchg someuser -x "#,at,aclchg,acladd,acldel,quit" # don't allow these aclchg otheruser +rwx "#?" # enable r/w access to "otheruser" aclchg otheruser -x "#,at,aclchg,acladd,acldel,quit" # don't allow them to use these commands # ----- After doing this (once), you start your session with: $ screen Then, the other user can join your terminal session(s) with youruserid: $ screen -r youruserid/ Note: the trailing "/" is required. Multiple users can share the same screen simultaneously, each with independent access controlled precisely with "aclchg" in the ~/.screenrc file. I use the following setup: # ~/.screenrc-base # default screenrc on any host source $HOME/.screenrc-base source $HOME/.screenrc-$HOST source $HOME/.screenrc-users # ----- Then, the base configurations are in ~/.screenrc-base; the host-specific configurations are in ~/.screenrc-$HOST, and the user configurations are in ~/.screenrc-users. The host-specific .screenrc file might contain some host-specific screen commands; e.g.: # ~/.screen-myhost # ----- screen -t 'anywhere' /bin/tcsh screen -t 'anywhere1' /bin/tcsh # ---- The .screenrc-base contains: # ~/.screenrc-base ## I find typing ^a (Control-a) awkward. So I set the escape key to CTRL-j instead of a. escape ^Jj termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@: autodetach on zombie kr verbose on multiuser on

This function runs a program in the background, and logs all output to an automatically created logfile. That way, you can still get at the output without it clogging up your terminal. Tip: Throw fork() and this: for prog in firefox kate konqueror ;do alias $prog="fork $prog";done into your bashrc, so that they'll automatically run out of the way. Show Sample Output

You can't stand programs x, y, and z. Remove all trace of their existence by adding this function to your config. It will remove the cruft, the settings, and such and such. This function doesn't even give a damn about you trying to remove programs that don't exist: it'll just for loop to the next one on your hit list. Show Sample Output

Have netcat listen on port 8000, point browser to http://localhost:8000/ and you see the information sent. netcat terminates as soon as your browser disconnects. I tested this command on my Fedora box but linuxrawkstar pointed out that he needs to use nc -l -p 8000 instead. This depends on the netcat version you use. The additional '-p' is required by GNU netcat that for example is used by Debian but not by the OpenBSD netcat port used by my Fedora system. Show Sample Output

'watch' repeatedly (default every 2 seconds, -n 1 => every second) runs a command (here ':', a shorthand for 'true'), displays the output (here nothing) and the date and time of the last run. I thought it to be obvious but it seemingly is not: to exit use Ctrl-C.

Finds all files of a certain name and reports all line with the string. Very simple. Show Sample Output

If you have lots of remote hosts sitting "behind" an ssh proxy host, then there is a special-case use of "rsynch" that allows one to easily copy directories and files across the ssh proxy host, without having to do two explicit copies: the '-e' option allows for a replacement "rsh" command. We use this option to specify an "ssh" tunnel command, with the '-A' option that causes authentication agent requests to be forwarded back to the local host. If you have ssh set up correctly, the above command can be done without any passwords being entered.

If your user has sudo on the remote box, you can rsync data as root without needing to login as root. This is very helpful if the remote box does not allow root to login over SSH (which is a common security restriction).

Many Mac OS X programs, especially those in Microsoft:Office, create ASCII files with lines terminated by CRs (carriage returns). Most Unix programs expect lines separated by NLs (newlines). This little command makes it trivial to convert them. Show Sample Output