Quick and dirty version. I made a version that checks if a manpage exists (but it’s not a oneliner). You must have ps2pdf and of course Ghostscript installed in your box.

Enhancements appreciated :-)

2) Bind a key with a command

bind -x '"\C-l":ls -l'


the -x option is for binding to a shell command

3) Use file(1) to view device information

file -s /dev/sd*

file(1) can print details about certain devices in the /dev/ directory (block devices in this example). This helped me to know at a glance the location and revision of my bootloader, UUIDs, filesystem status, which partitions were primaries / logicals, etc.. without running several commands.

See also:

file -s /dev/dm-* file -s /dev/cciss/*etc..

4) Single use vnc-over-ssh connection

ssh -f -L 5900:localhost:5900 your.ssh.server "x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0";
vinagre localhost:5900

This command

1. SSH into a machine
2. Tunnels VNC port to your local computer (“-L 5900:localhost:5900”)
3. Runs a single use vnc server (“x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0”)
4. Goes into the background (“-f”)
5. Runs VNC viewer on the local computer connecting to the remote machine via the newly created SSH tunnel (“vinagre localhost:5900”)

5) Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.

for i in ~/.adobe ~/.macromedia ; do ( rm $i/ -rf ; ln -s /dev/null $i ) ; done

Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

6) A child process which survives the parent’s death (for sure)

( command & )

curl --user login:password -o DeliciousBookmarks.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'

perl -wlne'/title>([^<]+)/i&&rename$ARGV,"$1.html"' *.html