Command Line Magic
This article lists some tricks for the command line that I find useful. They're written for Ubuntu, but should be largely compatible with other flavours of Linux.
Receiving notifications when a terminal job is done
Occasionally I perform time-intensive tasks on the command line like compiling, downloading or shuffling around large files. It would be nice to know when a task has been completed, so why not use Gnome's integrated notification system for this? The screenshot below shows an example.
The whole thing is very easy to set up: First, install the libnotify-bin package from the repositories if it isn't already installed, and then add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file:
alias alert_helper='history|tail -n1|sed -e "s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//" -e "s/;\s*alert$//"' alert_picture=/usr/share/icons/gnome/32x32/apps/gnome-terminal.png alias alert='notify-send -i "$alert_picture" "FINISHED: $(alert_helper)"'
Finally execute the updated .bashrc with the command << source ~/.bashrc >> and we're done! Now you will receive notifications whenever you issue commands in the form << command; alert >>. As an example, here's the command that produces the above notification:
wget http://dl.google.com/googletalk/googletalk-setup.exe; alert
