A time-saver for those that forget to sudo, bash substitutes !! for the last command entered, for example

<br />
charles@lucifer$ make sandwich<br />
Permission Denied!<br />
charles@lucifer$ sudo !!<br />
sudo make sandwich<br />
echo "You seriously think I would write a sandwich recipe just to demonstrate bash shortcut?"<br />
You seriously think I would write a sandwich recipe just to demonstrate a bash shortcut?<br />

I'm doing the hard-drive shuffle thing. I have a lot of data and I'm paranoid about losing it. I've been let down once or twice by bad copies so I thought I should take checksums before copying. I had a lot of fun arguing with wildcards and string escaping so I thought I'd share my adventure, as I've already worked out how to do this and forgotten at least once.

My first attempt. It dies when fed directories.

[code lang=bash]md5sum * | md5sums.txt
[/code]

I try again, and it occours to me to use tee in append mode so I get output to the screen as well

Ever been faced with a collection of files that need renaming and nearly gone mad from trying to do it manually? Lots of typing mv, or lots of right click -> rename. Enter qmv, part of renameutils. Suppose we have a bunch of mp3s that require renaming:

$ ls<br />
track10.mp3  track12.mp3  track2.mp3  track4.mp3  track6.mp3  track8.mp3<br />
track11.mp3  track1.mp3   track3.mp3  track5.mp3  track7.mp3  track9.mp3

Ever shutdown/rebooted the wrong machine through ssh+carelessness? molly-guard comes to the rescue, asking you to type the hostname of the machine you intend to shut down if it detects you are connected by ssh. It's packaged for and available in the main repositories Debian and Ubuntu, I don't know about any other distros.

An example:

[sudo] password for charles:
W: molly-guard: SSH session detected!
Please type in hostname of the machine to reboot: lucifer

To cut a very long explanination short, google have some linux repositories for a number of the more packaging systems inclusing APT (debian, ubuntu etc), YUM, RPM, urpmi and YaST2.

http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/index.html

Currently only contains google-desktop-linux and picasa

Forget 'holy war' articles. Linux.com found the big red button.The article entitled Ten sticking points for new Ubuntu usersis a shortsighted attempt at fueling the kind of flame war that drives users away from linux.

The world as we know it is ending. Reading Linux Format in bed is now met with requests for a cuddly Tux.

Charles:

This is the acid test: can I install *buntu when I'm this fsckd

Dave:

Tudrunktu: Ubuntu with WINE pre-configured for alcholic windows users....

Ever fond of the bargain basement, Tesco are selling bottom end PCs running Ubuntu. They cost less than a retail copy of MS Office 2007

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-3224/btnResultSort.x=509/btnResultSort.y...

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-6129/btnResultSort.x=509/btnResultSort.y...

The BBC quietly let slip that they do intend (eventually) for mac and linux users to be able to use its TV-catch up service.

Of course some of us have MythTV and never miss a program to beging with, unless the beeb can't keep to schedule.