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

I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog' Show Sample Output

Exit with error if script is not run in a terminal

Seen here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/

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.

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

Cleans all files in /tmp that have been accessed at least 2 days ago.

Bash process substitution which curls the website 'hashbang.sh' and executes the shell script embedded in the page. This is obviously not the most secure way to run something like this, and we will scold you if you try. The smarter way would be: Download locally over SSL > curl https://hashbang.sh >> hashbang.sh Verify integrty with GPG (If available) > gpg --recv-keys 0xD2C4C74D8FAA96F5 > gpg --verify hashbang.sh Inspect source code > less hashbang.sh Run > chmod +x hashbang.sh > ./hashbang.sh

Randomly decide whether to run a command, or fail. It's useful for testing purposes. . Usage: ran PERCENTAGE COMMAND [ARGS] Note: In this version the percentage is required. . This is like @sesom42 and @snipertyler's commands but in a USABLE form. . e.g. In your complicated shell script, put "ran 99" before a crucial component. Now, it will fail 1% of the time allowing you to test the failure code-path. ran 99 my_complex_program arg1 arg2 Show Sample Output

Bash's arithmetic evaluation.

Add this to your $HOME/.bashrc file. It will only set this prompt if it is running inside screen ($WINDOW var is set) Looks like this... ion@atomos:~[2]$ Show Sample Output

As mentioned in the summery that it is a powerful command to monitor system activity in great way. It has got the power of vmstat,iostat,mpstat,df,free and sar.Instead of firing each single command separately ,one can fire one single command to get all the info at once.But there is a way to get the individual information too. Please see the man page . You can get it from here : http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/ Show Sample Output

Also searches for aliases and shell builtins Show Sample Output

Usage: mydir=/very/long/path/to/a/dir cd mydir I often need to cd where no man wants to go (i.e. long path). by enabling the shell option cdable_vars, I can tell cd to assume the destination is the name of a variable.

This type of join is clearly documented in the bash manual. Only the first character of IFS is used for the delimiter. Show Sample Output

Using the --table-truncate ( -T ) option, you can specify the columns you will allow to be truncated. This helps when you have some columns that are unusually long, or a small terminal window. In this example we will print out the /etc/passwd file in columns. We are using a colon as our separator ( -s: ), defining that we want table output ( -t ), defining the column names ( -N ) and allowing the column NAME to be truncated ( -T ). Show Sample Output

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To get the connection information of protocol tcp and extended infortmation. Show Sample Output

no need to reinvent the wheel. Thanks to the OP for the "obsolete" hint. 'declare' may come in pretty handy on systems paranoid about "up-to-dateness" Show Sample Output

This is a very hackish way to do it that I'm mainly just posting for fun, and I guess technically can more accurately be said to result in undefined behavior. What the command does is tell the shell to treat libpng like it's a shell plugin (which it's most certainly not) and attempt to install a "png_create_read" command from the library. It looks for the struct with the information about the command; since it's always the command name followed by "_struct", it'll look for a symbol called "png_create_read_struct". And it finds it, since this is the name of one of libpng's functions. But bash has no way to tell it's a function instead of a struct, so it goes ahead and parses the function's code as if it was command metadata. Inevitably, bash will attempt to dereference an invalid pointer or whatever, resulting in a segfault.

Simply translates whitespace to newlines. Could be enhanced to compress out extra newlines, but that might be better handled in the next tool down the pipe, with eg uniq(1).