I love all the great utilities that are available out of the box with Linux. With the power they put at my fingers tips, I feel pretty darned near omnipotent at times when I am in front of the command line. Especially when some of the simplest utilities easily lay bare everything that is going on with the OS for me to scrutinize.

Earlier this evening a friend of mine who less than six months into his Linux journey catches me on IRC asking how he can tell which processes are consuming the most system resources as it happens.

Now here is where a little CLI magic comes with with the help of handful of *nix commands and a pair of pipes.

To grab a snap shot of the processes currently running on your box, you would use the 'ps' command. It has a heck of a lot of options. You can read more about it here or type 'man ps' in your console.

As a web application developer who works numerous websites that are spread across several different servers, it really pays off to invest the time to create scripts that can automagically perform the grunt work of regular maintenance. Especially something as critical as backups.

It can be a pain and more than a just little time consuming to manually back up the code of many different websites. So in comes one of an admins best friends - bash scripting. Within a few minutes, you can have a script created and set up as a daily cron job that will prove your worth to your employers and enable you to have more free time to pursue really important things like facebook and first person shooters.

I don't care how long you have been using Linux. You can be a complete neophyte or one who refers to themselves as a guru seasoned from years of experience. One day, it's going to happen. You are going to inadvertently start running a bunch of processes or multiple instances of the same application and before you know it - all the resources of your box are consumed, your hard drive is thrashing madly in desperate attempts to cache and your desktops response is getting slower than molasses in January.

You will be faced with a choice: A hard reboot or hunt down those processes and kill them.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I got away from MS Windows because I hate the idea of hard rebooting everytime the OS goes nuts. So, I learned how to mass murder those run away apps that I let suck up all my system resources from the command line.

Are you the impatient kind of geek who just can't spend the three extra seconds required to login to the Twitter web interface just to let all your followers that you just recompiled your kernel?

Got your console open and curl installed? Then tweet away with lightening fast speed by typing the following at the command line:

curl --basic --user "<twitter username here>:<twitter password here>" --data-ascii "status=I am so 133t that I tweet from the linux command line" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

Substitute <twitter username here> for your twitter login and <twitter password here> for your twitter password and then press enter.

When you look at your twitter page now - you can see just how 133t you are and now everybody else knows it.