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GNU/Linux: Assorted command line tricks and tips

...the shell is awesome! (by _Mammon, first published at searchlores in April 2008)
General Introduction _Mammon's Introduction bash galore: the functions Bash galore: One more Bash comments Related Sections going to GNU/Linux useful findings   ↔  Find, locate and grep Linux games		Version 0.03: April 2008

General Introduction

Every modern operating system has at least one shell and some have many. Some shells are command-line oriented, such as the GNU/Linux bash shell. Others are graphical, like Windows Explorer or the Macintosh Finder. Some users will interact with the shell only long enough to launch their favorite application, and then never emerge from that until they log off. But most users spend a significant amount of time using the shell. The more you know about your shell(s), the faster and more pro- ductive you can be.
Whether you are a system administrator, a programmer, or an end user, there are certainly occasions where a simple (or perhaps not so simple) shell script can save you time and effort, or facilitate consistency and repeatability for some important task. Even using an alias to change or shorten the name of a command you use often can have a significant effect, as you will be able to constate in _Mammon's .bash_alias.rc script.

The bash cookbook (OReilly.bash.Cookbook.May.2007.pdf)
Classic Shell Scripting (Classic_Shell_Scripting_OReilly_2005.chm)
Learning The BASH Shell (O'Reilly - Learning The BASH Shell, 3rd Edition_2005.chm)

Here are a couple of things that you can add to your ~/.bashrc (which should be probably symlinked to ~/.login) in order to make the CLI prompt more interesting.

Download zipped/bash_setup.tgz and untar.
You'll find inside it:

• .bash_colors.rc: Bash variables for console/terminal colors
• .bash_env.rc: Bash environment variables
• /.bashrc: Bash config file for non-login shells
• .bash_alias.rc: Standard aliases (e.g. shortcuts)
• .bash_app.rc:Bash aliases for application defaults and overrides
• .bash_fn.rc: Useful shell functions

# -------------------------------------------------------------------
# ifind : case insensitive find from the current directory
function ifind () {
        if [ -z "$1" ]
        then
		echo Usage: ifind pattern
		return 1
	fi

	find . -iname \*$*\*
}
# ------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh, one more people might be interested in:

# ------------------------------------------------------------------ %<
# alt_wm: run an alternate window manager in a new XServer session.
# Allows two XSessions to be run concurrently. Useful for testing
# new window managers that are buggy, e.g. Beryl or E17.
alt_wm () {
       if [ -z "$1" ]
       then
               echo Usage: alt_wm path [screen]
               return 1
       fi

       SCREEN_NUM=$2
       [ -z "$SCREEN_NUM" ] && SCREEN_NUM="1"

       xinit $1 -- :${SCREEN_NUM}
}
# ------------------------------------------------------------------ %<

echo `date`

echo 'date'

TODAYDATE=`date`
echo $TODAYDATE

The Z shell
~S~ Kane points out that the interactive zsh shell deserves a mention, "as it makes doing most of the crap you need to do with bash more than ten times easier out of the box. Most distros have a seperate package called zsh-completion that pretty much sets it up without any effort".
The z shell has indeed many interesting improvements (like a common command history among all running shells), and its ability to interactively evaluate arguments is indeed dramatically powerful.
Check its documentation.
The choice of shell is one of the most religious choices for GNU/Linux users. If you are new to GNU/Linux just accept (and delve into) the default shell bash, but as time goes and you get more advanced, you many want to change shell because you really miss certain features. This said, I would advise readers to stick to bash until they understand it adeguately, and consider changing shell only in a second phase.