useful for setting up shortcuts for longcommands, or even more clever things. From HACK 25, we could make anew command, lsnew, by doing this: alias lsnew=" ls -al --time-style=+%D | grep `date +%D` "But there are other uses of alias. For example, common mistypingmistakes. How many times have you accidentally left out the spacewhen changing to the parent directory? Worry no more! alias cd..="cd .."Alternatively, how about rewriting some existing commands? alias ls="ls -al"saves a few keypresses if, like us, you always want the completelist. To have these shortcuts enabled for every session, just add thealias commands to your user .bashrc file in your home directory. AlterMozilla's secret settingsDifficulty: Easy Application: Mozilla If you find that you would like to change how Mozilla works butthe preferences offer nothing by way of clickable options that canhelp you, there is a special mode that you can enable in Mozilla sothat you can change anything. To access it, type this into theaddress bar: about:configYou can then change each setting that you are interested in bychanging the Value field in the table. Other interesting modes include general information (about:),details about plugins (about:plugins), credits information(about:credits) and some general wisdom (about:mozilla). A backdrop ofstarsDifficulty: Easy Application: KStars You may already have played with KStars, as it was included withthe astronomy software that featured in LXF50's Roundup; but howabout creating a KStars backdrop image that's updated every time youstart up? KStars can be run with the --dump switch, which dumps out an imagefrom your startup settings, but doesn't load the GUI at all. You cancreate a script to run this and generate a desktop image, which willchange every day (or you can just use this method to generateimages). Run KStars like this: kstars --dump --width 1024 --height 768 --filename = ~/kstarsback.pngYou can add this to a script in your ~/.kde/Autostart folder to berun at startup. Find the file in Konqueror, drag it to the desktopand select 'Set as wallpaper' to use it as a randomly generatedbackdrop. Open an SVGdirectlyDifficulty: Easy Application: Inkscape You can run Inkscape from a shell and immediately edit a graphicdirectly from a URL. Just type: inkscape http://www.somehost.com/graphic.svgRemember to save it as something else though! Editingwithout an editorDifficulty: Intermediate Application: Various Very long files are often hard to manipulate with a text editor.If you need to do it regularly, chances are you'll find it muchfaster to use some handy command-line tools instead, like in thefollowing examples. To print columns eg 1 and 3 from a file file1 into file2, we canuse awk: awk '{print $1, $3}' file1 > file2To output only characters from column 8 to column 15 of file1, we canuse cut: cut -c 8-15 file1 > file2To replace the word word1 with the word word2 in the file file1, wecan use the sed command: sed "s/word1/word2/g" file1 > file2This is often a quicker way to get results than even opening a texteditor. Backupselected files onlyDifficulty: Intermediate Application: tar Want to use tar to backup only certain files in a directory? Thenyou'll want to use the -T flag as follows. First, create a file withthe