Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.

Not long ago I had the opportunity to show off GNU/Linux to a friend. She's been a lifelong Windows users and is just your average, non-technical computer user. Everything was going fine [until] I opened the command line.

One of the things I like about Linux is the command line. I have used nautilus, gnome-commander, konqueror, kommander, dolphin and thunar to manage files in Linux and these file managers are great for what they do. But there are times when one simply wants to find a file when working on the command line without having to open a GUI application.

There are many ways to view files in GNU/Linux. One of the simplest command line tools for viewing files is cat. The cat command, short for concatenate, is actually intended for joining multiple files into one, but it works equally well for viewing text files.

Linux has become so idiot proof nowadays that there is less and less need to use the command line. However, the commands and shell scripts have remained powerful for advanced users to utilize to help them do complicated tasks quickly and efficiently. To those of you who are aspiring to become a UNIX/Linux guru... there are plenty of cheat sheets available on the web and on books.

Among the commands: Find removed (deleted) files still in use via /proc, On-the-fly unrar movie in .rar archive and play it, does also work on part archives, List programs with open ports and connections, Manually pause/unpause an application (process), etc.

1. Use !!
Typing !! followed by Enter will bring back and execute the last command (same as Ctrl+P followed by Enter).