#! code

I'm not sure where I found this, but I have been using it on a few projects recently and it's helped a lot. It basically detects what system you are on and will give you a constant that keeps hold of the slash for that system.

Much like using Alt+. to print out last parameter you can also use !$ to use the last parameter from the previous command. Here is a simple example.

This might sound odd, but this is a mnemonic that helps you remember a sequence of letters that you can enter when your Linux system is locked. This is a last ditch attempt to get things up and running again and should only be used if all else fails and the only other thing that you can do it pull the plug.

If you have also tried pressing Ctrl+Alt+backspace and this does nothing then you can try using the key sequence Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring.

Searching for things in many files is easy with the grep command, but in order to view the results with the expression results highlighted you need to use grep in conjunction with less.

grep expression *.txt | less +/expression

If you wanted to search all files called something.txt for the letter d you would use this line.

grep d *.txt | less +/d

A handy trick when using a Unix/Linux system is to repeat the last parameter from the previous line. Lets say that you typed in the following line to move a file to another directory.

$ mv file.txt /usr/local/

To then move into that directory you can just type cd and Alt+. to copy in the last parameter used in the last line. This will put the following on the command line.

If you sent a curl request to the slashdot.org server you get back a random Futurama quote contained within the header information. The following curl command:

curl -Is slashdot.org

The commands supplied are I and s. I causes only the header of the file to be shown and s stops curl printing out anything. This returns the following headers: