This command displays a clock on your terminal which updates the time every second. Press Ctrl-C to exit. A couple of variants: A little bit bigger text: watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet -f big" You can try other figlet fonts, too. Big sideways characters: watch -n 1 -t '/usr/games/banner -w 30 $(date +%M:%S)' This requires a particular version of banner and a 40-line terminal or you can adjust the width ("30" here). Show Sample Output

Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

Though without infinite time and knowledge of how the site will be designed in the future this may stop working, it still will serve as a simple straight forward starting point. This uses the observation that the only item marked as strong on the page is the single logical line that includes the italicized fact. If future revisions of the page show failure, or intermittent failure, one may simply alter the above to read. wget randomfunfacts.com -O - 2>/dev/null | tee lastfact | grep \<strong\> | sed "s;^.*<i>\(.*\)</i>.*$;\1;" The file lastfact, can then be examined whenever the command fails.

Sqlite database keeps collecting cruft as time passes, which can be cleaned by the 'vacuum;' command. This command cleans up the cruft in all sqlite files relating to the user you have logged in as. This command has to be run when firefox is not running, or it will exit displaying the pid of the firefox running.

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

Alias two dots to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Show Sample Output

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

Trickle is a voluntary, cooperative bandwidth shaper. it works entirely in userland and is very easy to use. The most simple application is to limit the bandwidth usage of programs.

the middle command between the ; and ; is the vi commands that insert that line into the last line of the file, the esc with the carets is literally hitting the escape key, you have to have the smbfs package installed to do it, I use it to access my iTunes music on my mac from my linux PC's with amarok so I can play the music anywhere in the house. among other things, it allows you to access the files on that share from your computer anytime you're on that network.

More recent versions of the date command finally have the ability to decode the unix epoch time into a human readable date. This function makes it simple to utilize this feature quickly. Show Sample Output

This will show all changes in all log files under /var/log/ that are regular files and don't end with `gz` nor with a number Show Sample Output

If you can install rpl it's simpler to use and faster than combinations of find, grep and sed. See man rpl for various options. time on above operation: real 0m0.862s, user 0m0.548s, sys 0m0.180s using find + sed: real 0m3.546s, user 0m1.752s, sys 0m1.580s Show Sample Output

if you dont want to alias also then you can do killall rapidly_spawning_process ; !! ; !! ; !!

Output lines starting at line 2.

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

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

extension to tali713's random fact generator. It takes the output & sends it to notify-osd. Display time is proportional to the lengh of the fact.

list top committers (and number of their commits) of svn repository. in this example it counts revisions of current directory. Show Sample Output