First of all I’d like to thank TuxArena’s readers for giving good feedback in the first part of this series, which overviews 15 of the tools I consider particularly useful in a console. This article overviews 10 more such tools, and most of them were suggested by you. Screenshots included.

telnet
telnet is a well-known command-line tool which uses sockets to open a TCP connection to the specified hostname and port. telnet can be primarily used for non-secure connections to connect to a HTTP server and get a file or to an IRC server for example. Escape character in telnet is ^] (press Ctrl+])
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This is the second article in this series, and brings eight additional tips for working faster with the shell. Here is the first article of the series, containing 10 tips.

Aliases are handy custom commands which can be used to make shortcuts to various commands, scripts or one-liners. Aliases can be added in the ~/.bashrc file like this:

alias name='command'

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Taking a screenshot in command-line is very easy using the import tool, which is included in the ImageMagick suite. To take a screenshot of a single window use:

import filename.png

To take a screenshot of a single window and include window decorations, use:

import -border filename.png

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Using !!
This command is used to bring back and automatically execute the last command in history. It is the same as pressing C^P followed by Enter). Here’s an example:

debian$ cat /etc/debian_version
5.0.7
debian$ !!
cat /etc/debian_version
5.0.7

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