Pipe viewer

"Pipe viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion."

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

Recursively setting sensible permissions

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \; -or -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

UPDATE: Norgg and patrick have pointed out that the following, more simple command, does the same:

chmod -R a+rX .