I'll create a series (don't even know the number of items in the series) where I share with my loyal readers (in mathematical terms, that's an empty set) some handy tricks I've found when working with bash. Probably some of the tricks won't be the most efficient way to carry something out... but I can attest that, at the very least, they do work.

Scheduling services with cron and similar tools is great for repetitive tasks but inconvenient for one-time tasks that only need to be accomplished once. For tasks that only need to be accomplished once, use the at command.

Pressing the tab key in bash to auto-complete a file name is one of the most time saving tricks especially when dealing with very long file names. Unfortunately, file name completion is not always the right behavior. This is where the bash-completion package steps in.

A number of tricks and shortcuts can save you time and keystrokes when you’re using bash to knock out various chores. Here are five handy tips to get you started.

"Many professionals bill clients for their time. Even if you don't, keeping track of the time you actually spend on tasks can help you improve your time estimates and check if you're spending enough time on the things that are important to you. For example, keeping track of the time you spend on tasks might show you that you spend two and a half hours each day just responding to e-mail. If you can identify problem areas like that, then you can look for more effective ways to perform the tasks that take up a lot of your time. I love Org's timeclocking support, and I think you will too. Because it's integrated with your task list, you don't have to switch to separate application or reenter data. You can get more detailed time reports, too.

The book, Java EE 5 Development with NetBeans 6 takes you through the most important parts of Java EE programming and, with clear, careful instructions and screenshots, shows you how to use the features of NetBeans that will improve your development experience.

Yesterday we took a look at BashDiff, a patch for the bash shell that adds new capabilities. We've already looked at some of the additions that BashDiff makes to bash's commands and string parsing abilities. Today we'll look at modifying positional parameters, parsing XML, talking to ISAM and relational databases, creating GTK+2 GUIs, and a few other tricks and issues.

This article is a continuation to my other Bash-related post, 6 Bash Productivity Tips. Since that article gathered many useful comments and I bumped into several more over the net, here are 5 more tips and tricks. Although these may not be necessarily productivity-related, they will surely ease working in a Bash terminal and it may be worth knowing them.

If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks.