Quick Tips

Use free with '-s' option to get a continuous update of memory usage info

Written on April 14th, 2011 at 00:57 am by shredder12

Free command gives a concise information of the memory usage of the system. The program displays the info once and exits. You can use the ‘-s’ option to update the output continuously. Unlike top command, free doesn’t use ncurses, hence instead of a page refresh emulation its simply continuous printing. But it sure does the job.

Correct your habit of incorrectly typing "ls" using the program "sl"

Written on April 4th, 2011 at 23:25 pm by shredder12

Almost everyone of us would have made the mistake of incorrectly typing “sl” or “LS” instead of a simple “ls”. Seriously! how difficult could it be to type those two letters? But we keep making the same mistake over and over. In order to correct this problem, there is a wonderful program name “sl”. It shows a small animation of a steam locomotive(abbr. sl) every time we type “sl” or “LS”.

Open Terminals at any directory location, on the fly using nautilus-open-terminal extension

Written on January 5th, 2011 at 16:18 pm by shredder12

Many times, when you are navigating through folders using a file browser and after reaching somewhere deep into the hierarchy you realize that a terminal is required. Of course, it hardly takes any time to open a terminal and reach that location, but aren't computers all about getting things done as quickly and comfortably as possible? So, here is a nautilus extension for all such users - "nautilus-open-terminal".

Access ASCII table quickly using a single command

Written on December 23rd, 2010 at 23:07 pm by shredder12

Doesn't matter how common the character is, I just can't remember the ascii values and always end up referring the table. I was really annoyed at first because the only way I knew of finding an ascii table was through web and when you don't have enough bandwidth even opening a single html page sucks. But before I could learn to remember the value, I came to know that there is even an ASCII manpage.

Don't be misled from the file extension name. Get the actual file-type using file command

Written on November 26th, 2010 at 02:14 am by shredder12

So, a friend of mine sent me a file with extension .run.gz saying that its a pretty good game. I decided to give it a try and started to extract it, but wait! I got the error saying that it is not a gzip archive. Something was definitely wrong. I was totally confused, thinking "What the hell!!" . The mystery was finally revealed when I ran file command. It stated that the file is a "POSIX shell script text executable".

How to precisely find the amount of memory or RAM being used by Firefox

Written on April 10th, 2011 at 20:26 pm by shredder12

Until today, I relied on system monitor & top to find out the amount of memory being used by firefox. This works fine but there is an even better way to find out the exact amount used by the browser. Visit about:memory page to find it out.

Difference between a root and non-root shell prompt

Written on January 14th, 2011 at 20:49 pm by shredder12

Have you ever looked at the command prompt carefully? Exactly! we usually don't care about the prompt. All we see is the little symbol at the end designating the prompt(usually its “$”) or at most look at the current working directory. This way sometimes we might not realize its actually a root prompt. This happens a lot when you are working at multiple terminals.

Use dpkg to find out the files and directories created by a package at the time of install

Written on January 2nd, 2011 at 20:13 pm by shredder12

Whenever we install an application, it automatically creates a lot of files and directories on our system related to it. For debian systems, we can use the dpkg tool to find out all the files created and added by an application at the time of install.

Play a video in ASCII colour text format using Mplayer

Written on December 19th, 2010 at 21:26 pm by shredder12

Mplayer is a marvellous media player. Not just the fact that it can play almost all audio/video formats, it even provides you with a powerful command line. You can handle every feature of Mplayer through the terminal. Just to give you a taste of its awesomeness, here is a small trick to play video in a terminal using ASCII characters(in colour) through Mplayer.

How to view/list the files in an archive(tar or zip) without extracting/decompressing it

Written on November 8th, 2010 at 01:54 am by shredder12

Many a times, its better to view what's in the archive before extracting it. Sometimes the stuff compressed together is useless and extracting it might be just a waste of time and energy. Here we will consider both tar and zipped files and will list out the files bundled inside without fully extracting it.