One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000! $ G=$(stty -g);stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2));top -n1; stty $G;unset G Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well. # save the correct settings to G var. $ G=$(stty -g) # change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise $ stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2)) # run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least) $ top -n1 # reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself $ stty $G;unset G This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this! Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ] Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed

works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.

you have to replace "mustek_usb" with the scanner found by `scanimage -l`

Replace 12/31/1970 with your birth date.

Change bash autocomplete case search to insensitive when pressing tab for completion.

I like to label my grub boot options with the correct kernel version/build. After building and installing a new kernel with "make install" I had to edit my grub.conf by hand. To avoid this, I've decided to write this little command line to: 1. read the version/build part of the filename to which the kernel symlinks point 2. replace the first label lines of grub.conf grub.conf label lines must be in this format: Latest [{name}-{version/build}] Old [{name}-{version/build}] only the {version/build} part is substituted. For instance: title Latest [GNU/Linux-2.6.31-gentoo-r10.201003] would turn to title Latest [GNU/Linux-2.6.32-gentoo-r7.201004]"

Axel --max-speed=x, -s x You can specify a speed (bytes per second) here and Axel will try to keep the average speed around this speed. Useful if you don?t want the program to suck up all of your bandwidth.