When typing out long arguments, such as: cp file.txt /var/www/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ You can put that argument on your command line by holding down the ALT key and pressing the period '.' or by pressing <ESC> then the period '.'. For example: cd 'ALT+.' would put '/var/www/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ as my argument. Keeping pressing 'ALT+.' to cycle through arguments of your commands starting from most recent to oldest. This can save a ton of typing.

This command is a bit Linux specific, as --stdin doesn't exist for passwd on many Unix machines. Further, useradd is high level in most distributions and Unix derivatives except for the Debian family of distros, where adduser would be more appropriate. The last bit, with chage, will force the user to change their password on new login.

'visudo' is installed by default on most Unix-like systems. If not installed, you can get it from the 'sudo' package. 'visudo' will use the text editor found in your $EDITOR variable, whether it's vi, vim, emacs, nano or gedit. After making changes to the /etc/sudoers file, visudo will check for syntax errors, and notify you of them. This is better than 'vi /etc/sudoers', because of this capability. Rule #1 of system administration- if there is a tool that exists for editing config files, use the tool.

This assumes you have the 'rpm', 'rpm2cpio' and 'cpio' packages installed. This will extract the contents of the RPM package to your current directory. This is useful for working with the files that the package provides without installing the package on your system. Might be useful to create a temporary directory to hold the packages before running the extraction: mkdir /tmp/new-package/; cd /tmp/new-package

Many like to use 'dd' for creating CD/DVD iso images. This is bad. Very bad. The reason this is, is 'dd' doesn't have any built-in error checking. So, you don't know if you got all the bits or not. As such, it is not the right tool for the job. Instead, 'reaom' (read optical media) from the wodim package is what you should be using. It has built-in error checking. Similarly, if you want to burn your newly creating ISO, stay away from 'dd', and use: wodim -v -eject /path/to/image.iso

This assumes you have the package installed necessary for converting WMF files. On my Ubuntu box, this is libwmf-bin. I used this command, as libwmf is not on my wife's iMac, so I archived the directories containing the WMF files from OS X, ran them on my Ubuntu box, archived the resulting SVGs, and sent them back to her. Quick, simple and to the point. Searches directories recursively looking for extensions ignoring case. This is much more readable and clean than -exec for find. The while loop also gives further flexibility on complex logic. Also, although there is 'wmf2svg --auto', it expects lowercase extensions, and not uppercase. Because I want to ignore case, I need to use the -o option instead. Works in ZSH and BASH. Haven't tested in other shells.

This is a simple example of using proper command nesting using $() over ``. There are a number of advantages of $() over backticks. First, they can be easily nested without escapes: program1 $(program2 $(program3 $(program4))) versus program1 `program2 \`program3 \`program4\`\`` Second, they're easier to read, then trying to decipher the difference between the backtick and the singlequote: `'. The only drawback $() suffers from is lack of total portability. If your script must be portable to the archaic Bourne shell, or old versions of the C-shell or Korn shell, then backticks are appropriate, otherwise, we should all get into the habit of $(). Your future script maintainers will thank you for producing cleaner code.

Discovering all executables on your system that can be run as another user, especially root, is critical for system security. The above command will find those files with have SUID or SGID bits set and are owned by the root user or group.

Rather than typing out all 10 files, you can use brace expansion to do the trick for you. This is useful for backup files, numbered files, or any files with a repeating pattern. Gives more control than 'rm file*' as I might want to keep others around.

When downloading RPMs from the Internet, you don't have to 'rpm -i' or 'rpm -U' to install the package. Especially, if the package has dependencies. If you have YUM setup to access an RPM repository, this command will install the downloaded package, then any dependencies through YUM that it relies on. Very handy on RPM-based systems.

In this case, I'm keeping an eye on /var/log/messages, but of course any file will do. When I'm following a file, I generally don't want to see anything other than what has been added due to the command or service I've executed. This keeps everything clean and tidy for troubleshooting.

This is a simple case of recursing through all directories, adding the '.bak' extension to every file. Of course, the 'cp $file $file.bak' could be any code you need to apply to your recursion, including tests, other functions, creating variables, doing math, etc. Simple and clean recursion.

Useful mainly for debugging or troubleshooting an application or system, such as X11, Apache, Bind, DHCP and others. Another useful switch that can be combined with -mmin, -mtime and so forth is -daystart. For example, to find files that were modified in the /etc directory only yesterday: sudo find /etc -daystart -mtime 1 -type f