This one-liner fills the screen with randomly colored lines.

While going through the source code for the well known ps command, I read about some interesting things.. Namely, that there are a bunch of different fields that ps can try and enumerate for you. These are fields I was not able to find in the man pages, documentation, only in the source. Here is a longer function that goes through each of the formats recognized by the ps on your machine, executes it, and then prompts you whether you would like to add it or not. Adding it simply adds it to an array that is then printed when you ctrl-c or at the end of the function run. This lets you save your favorite ones and then see the command to put in your .bash_profile like mine at : http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Note that I had to do the exec method below in order to pause with read. t () { local r l a P f=/tmp/ps c='command ps wwo pid:6,user:8,vsize:8,comm:20' IFS=' '; trap 'exec 66 exec 66 $f && command ps L | tr -s ' ' >&$f; while read -u66 l >&/dev/null; do a=${l/% */}; $c,$a k -${a//%/} -A; yn "Add $a" && P[$SECONDS]=$a; done } Show Sample Output

`while true`: do forever `nc -l -p 4300 -c 'echo hello'`: this is the but anything can go here really `test $? -gt 0 && break`: this checks the return code for ctrl^c or the like and quite the loop, otherwise in order to kill the loop you'd have to get the parent process id and kill it. Show Sample Output

At times I find that I need to loop through a file where each value that I need to do something with is not on a separate line, but rather separated with a ":" or a ";". In this instance, I create a loop within which I define 'IFS' to be something other than a whitespace character. In this example, I iterate through a file which only has one line, and several fields separated with ":". The counter helps me define how many times I want to repeat the loop.

If you're very busy and don't want to wait for a ping response, use it. This command will be waiting for a successful ping response, to play a sound file to warn you that the target host is available.

pcspkr have to be enabled! modprobe pcspkr xset b on

For use when you can't use "watch" (user-defined functions, aliases). This isn't mine - its an alternate posted in the comments by flatcap, and is the shortest and easiest to remember.

Simply add this to whatever apache startup script you have, or if you are on a MAC, create a new automator application. This will show a pretty growl notification whenever theres a new Apache error log entry. Useful for local development

Sometimes I get FLAC files that RhythmBox can't play but VLC can. So I re-encode them using GStreamer at highest compression.

This command will take the output of curl and read it line by line, skipping a step in downloading the file then parsing it. You can then parse each line, or only print the lines that contain certain works using if statements, or whatever you can come up with. Or you can change IFS and use it to parse based on separators other than newline.

Abort/Break with CTRL-C when no output is shown anymore (break while true loop). Show Sample Output

while commandt do command command ... done {commandt is executed and its exit status tested.} for i in 1 2 3 > do > echo $i > done Show Sample Output

Consider the following simple situation [ reading something using while and read ] [See script 1 in sample output] --------------------------------------------------- The variable var is assigned with "nullll" at first. Inside the while loop [piped while] it is assigned with "whillleeee". [Onlly 2 assignments stmts]. Outside the loop the last assigned value for "var" [and no variable] inside the while can't be accessed [Due to pipe, var is executed in a sub shell]. In these type of situation variables can be accessed by modifying as follows. [See script 2 in sample output] ___________________________ Vary helpful when reading a set of items, say file names, stored on a file [or variable] to an array an use it later. Is there any other way 2 access variables inside and outside the loop ?? Show Sample Output