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

Remove security from PDF document using this very simple command on Linux and OSX. You need ghostscript for this baby to work.

Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages. For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac: curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '<entry>' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' | perl -pe 's/^<title>(.*)<\/title>.*<name>(.*)<\/name>.*$/$2 - $1/' If you want to see the name of the last person, who added a message to the conversation, change the greediness of the operators like this: curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '<entry>' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' | perl -pe 's/^<title>(.*)<\/title>.*?<name>(.*?)<\/name>.*$/$2 - $1/' Show Sample Output

The empty file /forcefsck causes the file system check fsck to be run next time you boot up, after which it will be removed. This works too: sudo >/forcefsck

cat? dd? RTFM

Instead of deleting an existing symlink and then re-creating it pointing at the new location, it is possible to perform the same action with this one command. Interesting discussion on whether this is possible to do atomically here: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=526119

If you are doing some tests which require reboots (e. g. startup skripts, kernel module parameters, ...), this is very time intensive, if you have got a hardware with a long pre-boot phase due to hardware checks. At this time, kexec can help, which only restarts the kernel with all related stuff. First the kernel to be started is loaded, then kexec -e jumps up to start it. Is as hard as a reboot -f, but several times faster (e. g. 1 Minute instead of 12 on some servers here). Show Sample Output

This is useful if you have a program which doesn't work well with multicore CPUs. With taskset you can set its CPU affinity to run on only one core.

The `export` is unnecessary if it's only applicable to the one command.

I have come across a situation in the past where someone has unlinked a file by running an 'rm' command against it while it was still being written to by a running process. The problem manifested itself when a 'df' command showed a filesystem at 100%, but this did not match the total value of a 'du -sk *'. When this happens, the process continues to write to the file but you can no longer see the file on the filesystem. Stopping and starting the process will, more often than not, get rid of the unlinked file, however this is not always possible on a live server. When you are in this situation you can use the 'lsof' command above to get the PID of the process that owns the file (in the sample output this is 23521). Run the following command to see a sym-link to the file (marked as deleted): cd /proc/23521/fd && ls -l Truncate the sym-link to regain your disk space: > /proc/23521/fd/3 I should point out that this is pretty brutal and *could* potentially destabilise your system depending on what process the file belongs to that you are truncating. Show Sample Output

Uses inotifywait from inotify-tools ( http://wiki.github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/ ), that is compatible only with linux. Usefull when you work with files that have to be compiled.. latex, haml, c..

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.

Very simple web server listening on port 80 will serve index.html file or whatever file you like pointing your browser at http://your-IP-address/index.html for example. If your web server is down for maintenance and you'd like to inform your visitors about it, quickly and easily, you just have to put into the index.html file the right HTML code and you are done! Of course you need to be root to run the command using port 80.

This command asks for the station name and then connects to somafm, Great for those who have linux home entertainment boxes and ssh enabled on them, just for the CLI fiends out there ( I know I'm one of them ;) Also, don't forget to add this as alias(ie alias somafm="read -p 'Which Station? "; mplayer --reallyquite -vo none -ao sdl

Fetches the IPs and ONLY the IPs from ifconfig. Simplest, shortest, cleanest. Perl is too good to be true... (P.S.: credit should go to Peteris Krumins at catonmat.net) Show Sample Output

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

Suppose you made a backup of your hard disk with dd: dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/disk/backup.img This command enables you to mount a partition from inside this image, so you can access your files directly. Substitute PARTITION=1 with the number of the partition you want to mount (returned from sfdisk -d yourfile.img). Show Sample Output

Produces secure passwords that satisfy most rules for secure passwords and can be customized for correct output as needed. See "man pwgen" for details. Show Sample Output

This should do the same thing and is about 70 chars shorter. 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

This is a very powerful command line tool to gather statistics for a Linux system. http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/ Show Sample Output