When I first started using Linux a few years ago, I could not for the life of me understand why anyone would want to use the command line for anything as long as there was a graphical alternative. After all, I belong to the group of people who grew up with graphical interfaces. Sure I’ve enjoyed more than my share of DOS games and text-based MUDs, but that command line business was very scary to me up until just a few years ago.

Then I started using Linux. In the beginning I always used graphical applications for everything from managing files and directories to setting file permissions, but somehow, slowly but surely I started noticing that some things could be done so much easier and faster if done in the command line, compared to the graphical alternative - and then I still didn’t know about scripting! Once I figured out that you could automate tasks by writing bash scripts, I was in love.

Throughout this article I will list and explain what I think are the ten most useful bash commands. Whether you’re a bash guru or a command-line newbie, keep reading to see if there are any commands that could be useful to you.

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It’s no big secret that I absolutely love Bash. It’s such a simple, yet versatile tool. Ever since I first discovered the power contained within it, I’ve written plenty of scripts to automate tasks that would otherwise take me a long time to do manually. Sometimes I write scripts so that my little brother can do certain things that would otherwise require him to use relatively complex command-line tools. But what would be the point of replacing a command-line tool with another command-line tool?

Sometimes a graphical user interface is what’s needed - and that’s where Zenity comes into play!

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If you’re not a member of the Swedish community ungdomar.se or any of the other sites from the same company (e.g. gameplayer.se) this article will be of very little use to you. However, if you are a member of said community, I will show you how to get data from there onto your desktop using a little bit of Bash magic combined with the power of Conky. Even if you don’t care about ungdomar.se, the same techniques that I’m going to show you could be used to fetch wheather information, the TV guide, stock prices, or pretty much anything else.

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