I use terminal with black background on the Mac. Unfortunately, the default ls color for the directory is blue, which is very hard to see. By including the line above in my ~/.bash_profile file, I changed the directory's color to cyan, which is easer to see. For more information on the syntax of the LSCOLORS shell variable: man ls I tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard

This helps to keep track of what is going on when you have several tabs open in your terminal. The title automatically changes when you change directories.

pushd and popd are your friends, but sometimes they're just incompatible with the way one works... Two shell functions: bm bookmarkname - "bookmarks" the current directory, just 'cd $BMbookmarkname' to return to it. forget bookmarkname - unsets the 'bookmarkname' variable. It isn't mandatory, they cease to exist when the session ends. Show Sample Output

Thanks to the authors of: awk '!x[$0]++' <file> and the author of: joinargs() { (local IFS="$1"; shift && echo "$*") } and others, we can have a fast Linux or android. IMPORTANT if you find a priority order problem in PATH you can push a path directory to the front without duplication as follows: PATH=/bin:$PATH then ... Check duplication with: echo $PATH|tr : '\n'|sort|uniq -d Finally do a very neat line by line list of $PATH: echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'} The speed up is very noticeable for android, and builds on Linux Ubantu are much faster with make and scripts. I will update the command on request. Timothy from SONY

combination of several of the above

set how many commands to keep in history Default is 500 Saved in /home/$USER/.bash_history Add this to /home/$USER/.bashrc HISTFILESIZE=1000000000 HISTSIZE=1000000

This is a useful command to backup an sd card with relative total size for piping to pv with a progressbar

This coloured prompt will show: username in green, grey "@" sign, hostname in red, current directory in yellow, typed commands in green.

Must be done as root - will cause subsequent ssh connections to use the identities available via the [user]'s agent socket. Show Sample Output

used in an if-then-else in case the default shell is ksh, not bash. The $(basename ${0#-}) is handy to echo which shell and strip the dash some flavors put in front of "bash" if [ $(basename ${0#-}) == "bash" ] ; then export PS1='\[\e]0;\h \u \w\a\]\n\[\e[0;34m\]\u@\h \[\e[33m\]\w\[\e[0;32m\]\n\$ ' else HOST=`hostname` ESC=`echo "\033"` BEL=`echo "\007"` RAW=`echo "\r"` export PS1='-${RAW}${ESC}]0;${HOST} ${USER}${BEL}-${ESC}[0;34m${USER}${ESC}[0m@${ESC}[0;34m${HOST%%.*}${ESC}[0;33m${ESC}[0m $ ' fi Show Sample Output

If you have multiple displays or monitors the DISPLAY environment variable will tell X where to send the output. This is very handy for setting up a mediacenter at home. You can plugin the computer to the TV and then ssh to the computer and set the DISPLAY as above, then run your program and it will show up on the TV.

Prompts the user for username and password, that are then exported to http_proxy for use by wget, yum etc Default user, webproxy and port are used. Using this script prevent the cleartext user and pass being in your bash_history and on-screen Show Sample Output

Running this command turns shell tracing and shell verbose debugging on or off. Not only does it do that, it also uses your terminals builtin method of setting colors to make debugging much easier. It looks at the current shell options contained in the $- special bash variable and that lets this function set the opposite of the current value. So from the shell you could do a: setx; echo "y" | ( cat -t ) | echo "d"; setx and it will turn on debbuggin. This is an amazingly useful function that is perfect to add system-wide by adding it to /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc.. You can run it from the shell, and you can also use it in your shell scripts like my .bash_profile - http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

you should have the "most" package installed. I like it because it is colorful and easier to read. alternatively you can use "less" instead of "most". you can also add this to your ~/.bashrc to make it permanent.

Adds the time in 12hr AM/PM format to the beginning of a prompt. Change \@ to \t for 24-hour time or \T for 12hr without AM/PM. To keep the time the next time you open a terminal, edit ~/.bashrc and stick the command at the bottom. Show Sample Output

This will affect all invocations of grep, even when it is called from inside a script.

I was surprised to find that with RedHat bash, I could not find any comment lines (begining with #) in my bash shell history. Surprised because in Mageia Linux this works. It turns out that RedHat's bash will keep comment lines if in my .bashrc, I define: export HISTIGNORE=' cd "`*: PROMPT_COMMAND=?*?' Why have comment lines in shell history? It's a handy and convenient way to make proto-commands (to be completed later) and for storing brief text data that is searchable in shell history. Show Sample Output

Adds a function that runs every time the prompt is rendered. The function grabs the CWD from PWD and issues a command to tmux to change the current window