Ok, so you know grep, awk and sed. You can ls and cd your way anywhere on your computer. You can even eject your cdrom by typing several letters instead of pressing one button. But here's a fresh*,new**, and perhaps even slightly humorous take on several of your all time favorites.

10. mplayer
Mplayer is the end-all for video. With upwards of seven kazillion command line options, there's almost nothing you cannot do. Want to encode a file? Sure! Play a DVD? Why not! Output in coloured text instead of pixels? Absolutely! Run a small country? Well, maybe if you used mplayer and grep really cleverly...

9. killall -9
Ever really, REALLY want a program to go away? killall -9 is your new best friend. It'll take down that program. It doesn't matter if it's Gaim, Firefox, or a copy of MySQL that's serving thousands of requests per minute. It's going down, and it's going down now.

8. split
Tired of having your large files be large files? Use split! Instantly*** you'll convert one massive, usable file into dozens or hundreds of useless ones! And how do you convert the bits of your useful file back into your useful file? Perhaps using the aptly named "join" command? Nope! You need to cat them all back together. Fun for the whole family!

7. locate
I put the file right there. It was right there!! Never fear, citizen! Through the awesome power of locate, you'll soon be able to locate your lost file... Provided the locate database has been backed up sometime this century.

6. links
Do you enjoy surfing the internet, but hate all those crazy "graphics" getting in your way? Try links! Links allows you to surf the web without interference from jpegs, gifs, flash animations, javascript, java, and many other types of annoying content. It even frees you from that horrid "mouse" fad. Three cheers for links!

5. nano
Vi? Emacs? Forget 'em! Nano is the official command line editor for Mental Deficients, Ubuntu users, and the Beige Binary Blog! No fancy commands or extensible interfaces here, just plain, solid text editing.

4. wine
Want to run a Windows program? Well, provided it's not a game, particularly complex program, or anything remotely interesting, wine will run it for you! Simply call wine and the location of a windows .exe file, and it'll crash with a variety of interesting error messages run the file for you! Amazing!

3. man
Let's face it: You don't know what you're doing. You've been trying to get mplayer to play episode 17 of Star Trek:Season one for the last hour, and you need some help. Simply call "man mplayer" and you'll be presented with a list of command line switches so long it makes War and Peace look like a Sunday read. By the time you've finished slogging through that, you won't be in any mood to watch Star Trek. Problem solved!

2. fsck
Ahh, fsck. What other command can double as an expletive AND a useful linux command. What more can I say?

And the number one curiously useful linux command:

1. pizza_party
And, for once, I'm not joking. Pizza_party is a way to order Domino's(tm)(R)(C)(cc)(xyz) pizza. You call it with a few arguments, and then, as if by magic, pizza arrives at your door within an hour. Seriously, command line pizza.

Cheers!
-Jeff

*Not fresh
**Not new
***"Instantly" meaning "Anywhere from several minutes to a day and a half, depending on the file size and the speed of your hard drive".