Since Adobe has introduced Flash, there have always been major and minor problems with that on all platforms, especially on Linux. One problem I often had to deal with is a focus stealing bug with Kwin, KDE's window manager.
grep is probably one of the best known, or let's better say: the most used command line tools on UNIX systems. But not many people know that it is so much more than just a very simple text search command.
Linux is a multitasking operating system, so you can execute several programs at once. It is also possible to make use of this on the console.
You are probably familiar with RAID-1, which is a mirroring technique for synchronizing data between two or more disks for the sake of redundancy. Normally, RAID-1 mirrors data between several local disks, but you can also sync them over Ethernet. This is not conventional RAID-1 but at least comparable.
When locating files on your disk locate is a nice tool because it indexes your hard drive and therefore finds files very quickly. But locate can also be a great security threat to your system.
All Linux administrators know this tool and some make use of it very often: cat. Also Linux beginners get to know this quickly and use it a lot. Most people love it so much that they utilize it in every situation whether it's needed or absolute nonsense.
Loop devices on Linux are virtual devices which can be used to mount files like real devices. For historical reasons you have 8 such loop devices by default, but in current Kernel releases you can of course use more than just 8.
One little tool which's often overlooked is tee. It is very smart and can help you so much. tee is a typical UNIX program. It can't do much and has been created for only one purpose: writing STDIN to STDOUT and a file. That doesn't sound very exiting yet but this simple tool can do a lot for you.
You probably know the bash history function. All commands you entered are stored in memory and will be written to ~/.bash_history as soon as you exit your current shell. You may have used this often by tapping the up and down arrow keys to repeat the last few commands. But did you know that bash can do much more history work for you?
