shopt causes bash completion to stop working.

Couple of days, I added some scripts to my bash startup and suddenly realized that bash completions stopped working. This is tricky situation in bash to figure out what went wrong. So, I set my foot down to make sure that I find out the culprit. Thus I started with method of elimination. So, I started with nothing in .bashrc and kept adding my stuff in batches, until the said feature was broken. Once that happened I started removing the added ones, one by one, until my completion started working again.

Linux humour – tar is coward

Some errors are too good and though you would have seen them couple of times you don’t realize until sometimes it just hits you, like the one below:

tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive

Related articles

• Tar Tricks on Linux (descentintodarkness.wordpress.com)

New feature in Nautilus – resize icon on desktop.

On Desktop on Gnome using nautilus, now you can resize individual icons. Just right click on the icon to resize and in the menu you will get a resize icon :

[][1]

and then you can resize the icon from the borders:

[][2]

Related articles

• “Where is this icon?” Nautilus script is incredibly nifty (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Use Nautilus’ Emblems feature to keep your home folder organised (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Screenshots: Desktop Unity in Natty (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Add a quick-access shortcuts to the GNOME right-click menu (ghacks.net)

Shell Scripting

Here are some links for bash programming that you may find useful.

http://tips-linux.net/en/content/pro-bash-programming

http://tips-linux.net/en/content/expert-shell-scripting

http://tips-linux.net/en/content/beginning-linux-command-line

http://tips-linux.net/en/content/bash-pocket-reference

http://tips-linux.net/en/content/linux-command-line-and-shell-scripting-bible

Related articles

• Linux – Learning the Shell (edugeek.net)
• 10 Useful Tools, Websites And Tricks to Help You Master Linux Command (maketecheasier.com)
• lf-submit.sh – Bash mplayer Last.fm scrobbler (yjl.im)
• Linux command line tricks you need to know: IO redirection and piping (interstellr.com)
• imabonehead: Houcem HACHICHA’s Blog: My top ten shell/bash tricks! (houcemhachicha.blogspot.com)

Execute a command with a timeout

Execute a command with a timeout

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      &nbsp;timelimit -t100 somecommand
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

I found this in Ubuntu repos, and consider it better than timeout.

* View this command to comment, vote or add to favourites * View all commands by CodSpirit

write the output of a command to /var/log/user.log… each line will contain $USER, making this easy to grep for.

write the output of a command to /var/log/user.log… each line will contain $USER, making this easy to grep for.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      &nbsp;log() { (echo "$ $@";$@) | logger -t $USER; }
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

This command is useful if you want to copy the output of a series of commands to a file, for example if you want to pastebin the output from ‘uname -a’, ‘lspci -vvv’ and ‘lsmod’ for video driver trouble-shooting on your favorite Linux forum.

Empty a file

This one is for those who know the “touch” command. Hope all of us do not follow a  command just because it is on one of the popular site without trying to understand the command and the output.