This will view the console and assumes the screen is 80 characters wide. Use /dev/vcs2 for the next virtual console.. etc. Show Sample Output

Downloads at 12:00

Converts images (maybe from scans) into a PDF

Other logs can be monitored similarly, e.g. watch "tail -15 /var/log/daemon.log"

When you fill a formular with Firefox, you see things you entered in previous formulars with same field names. This command list everything Firefox has registered. Using a "delete from", you can remove anoying Google queries, for example ;-)

Extracted from http://www.howtogeek.com/wiki/Recursively_Add_Changed_Files_to_Subversion

This is useful for remove all packages that are part of a common suite.

This command adds the numbers 10, 12, 14 to a bunch of mp3's in the current working directory. You can then run the command replacing the inital i=10 with i=11 to add 11,13,15 in another directory then mv the files together and the first files interweave with the second group of files. I used this to weave a backlog of a podcast with other podcast so I didn't get sick of one while I was catching up. I started at 10 because printf blows up with 0 padded numbers 08 and 09 which kind of makes the printf command redundant as it was used to pad numbers 1 - 9 so they would come first and not get sorted incorrectly

This is a simple command, but extremely useful. It's a quick way to search the file names in the current directory for a substring. Normally people use "ls *term*" but that requires the stars and is not case insensitive. Color (for both ls and grep) is an added bonus.

Reduce the number of keystrokes it takes to open a file in vim. First of all, you just need to type "v", which is less than half the number of characters (!), and second-of-all, you only need to enter a substring of the file you want to open. For example, if you want to open the file, homework.txt, then type "v hom" to open it. Good tip is to use the lowest unique substring, otherwise you'll open multiple files in different buffers (which is sometimes desirable). Use Ctrl-^ to switch between buffers.

This example, for example, produces the output, "Fri Feb 13 15:26:30 EST 2009"

Have a grudge against someone on your network? Do a "find -writable" in their directory and see what you can vandalize! But seriously, this is really useful to check the files in your own home directory to make sure they can't inadvertently be changed by someone else's wayward script.

Info has some of the worst keybindings I've ever seen. Being a vim user, I attribute that to emacs influence. Use the --vi-keys option to use some of the vi keybindings, although this won't change all the keybindings. Use the "infokey" program to have more control over info keybindings.

Although less behaves more or less like vim in certain aspects, the vim regex for word boundaries (\< and \>) do not work in less. Instead, use \b to denote a word boundary. Therefore, if you want to search for, say, the word "exit", but do not want to search for exiting, exits, etc., then surround "exit" with \b. This is useful if you need to search for specific occurrences of a keyword or command. \b can also be used at just the beginning and end, if needed.

Ever since the switch to pulseaudio, Ubuntu users including myself have found themselves with no sound intermittently. To fix this, just use this command and restarts firefox or mplayer or whatever.

This example uses the -exec option to move all matching files into a backup directory

Converts windows lined-style file to unix. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline Can be used to convert from linux2dos : just invert \r\n and \n.

Lists the local files that are not present in the remote repository (lines beginning with ?) and add them. Show Sample Output

creates a tar.gz with a name like: backup20090410_173053.tar.gz of a given directory. this file was made 10 April 2009 at 5:30:53pm see date's man page to customize the timestamp format

A bash function might also be useful: dict() { curl dict://dict.org/d:$1; } Or if you want less verbose output: dict() { curl -s dict://dict.org/d:$1 | perl -ne 's/\r//; last if /^\.$/; print if /^151/../^250/'; } Show Sample Output