Today I learned that commandlinefu.com is not a alone in its conquest for further the knowledge about the command line. Allow me to introduce you to http://shell-fu.org/

Using DynDNS or a similar service not only allows access to your home machine from outside without needing to know what IP the ISP has assigned to it but it also comes in handy if you want to know your external IP address. The only purpose of the sed command is to remove the leading "host.na.me has address " part from the output. If you don't need to discard it you can simply use host $HOSTNAME

To change to $HOME in that manner you need to set a shell option. In zsh it is auto_cd, hence setopt -o auto_cd in bash4 it is autocd, hence shopt -s autocd What the option does is allow you to cd to a directory by just entering its name. This also works if the directory name is stored in a variable: www=/var/www/lighttpd; $www sends you to /var/www/lighttpd. CAUTION: If a command or function name identical to the directory name exists it takes precedence.

Depending on the installation only certain of these man pages are installed. 12 is left out on purpose because ISO/IEC 8859-12 does not exist. To also access those manpages that are not installed use opera (or any other browser that supports all the character sets involved) to display online versions of the manpages hosted at kernel.org: for i in $(seq 1 11) 13 14 15 16; do opera http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man7/iso_8859-$i.7.html; done

Let me suggest using wget for obtaining the HTTP header only as the last resort because it generates considerable textual overhead. The first ellipsis of the sample output stands for Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists. --2009-03-31 20:42:46-- http://www.example.com/ Resolving www.example.com... 208.77.188.166 Connecting to www.example.com|208.77.188.166|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... and the second one looks for Length: 438 [text/html] Remote file exists and could contain further links, but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving. Show Sample Output

Without the -dump option the header is displayed in lynx. You can also use w3m, the command then is w3m -dump_head http://www.example.com/ Show Sample Output

In the above example 'muspi merol' (the output of the first rev command) is sent to stderr and 'lorem ipsum' (the output of the second rev command) is sent to stdout. rev reverse lines of a file or files. This use of tee allows testing if a program correctly handles its input without using files that hold the data. Show Sample Output

rot13 maps a..mn..z (A..MN..Z) to n..za..m (n..za..m) and so does this alias.

An improved version of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1772/simple-countdown-from-a-given-date that uses Perl to pretty-print the output. Note that the GNU-style '--no-title' option has been replaced by its one-letter counterpart '-t'. Show Sample Output

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.

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.