Character encoding is always a problem when communicating between Windows and Linux. And using the "tree" command is affected by this problem if you are connected to a Linux box using Putty on a Windows box. You will certainly get weird characters, probably squares.

For those who are not sure about what tree is. It is a command-line tool to list contents of directories in a tree-like format.

A solution to this problem is to force using plain ASCII characters:

tree --charset=ASCII

You can also have an alias for this command, so that every time you type "tree", it will force tree to use the ASCII charset automatically.

alias tree='tree --charset=ASCII'

And this is an example of what you will get as an output:

/tmp
|-- claws-mail-1000
|-- keyring-x803mg
|   |-- control
|   |-- pkcs11
|   `-- ssh
|-- orbit-gdm [error opening dir]
`-- virtual-user

The Samsung Exclaim™ requires the 3g2 format for its ringtones or even videos. This is a format that is optimized for 3G phones. Fortunately on Linux, FFmpeg is a very complete tool to work with audio and video formats and convert between them, and it can, of course, generate 3g2 files.

If you have compiled and installed the right packages (Medibuntu repository with the libaac support, for example), you can easily do one of these commands with ffmpeg:

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Possibly you will need to either do a diff between files where they don't use the same new line character.

Because the new line character is OS-dependant, there are issues when doing a diff on these files when you are not using that same OS.
And there are also times where you just want diff to ignore all spaces and new lines...

The --ignore-all-space option for diff is really useful in these two cases. It will check for differences between the given files ignoring spaces or new lines whether there is none, one or more

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You certainly know that manpages tend to be very long and boring to read , especially without any colors at all.

You can easily get colored manpages with just one copy&paste into your .bashrc!

Follow this link to Linuxtidbits' post about "Less Colors For Manpages" and you'll know how to make it happen!