Free Like GNU

I just noticed this one tonight, check out Command-line Fu for lots of great shell-j00ky!
Thanks again to NixCraft for the link!

Folks may shun the shell when using their computers but honestly, there are some great treasures to be found.  Today I’ll highlight a great little network bandwidth and connection monitor called iftop.
This handy terminal tool shows a near real-time display of connections to or from your computer through a network device. It will give you a nice little bar-graph representation as well!

You can install it in Ubuntu or Debian with a quick:

$ sudo apt-get install iftop

Then try this to see whats happening on your wireless card:

$ sudo iftop -i wlan0 -P

the “-i ” specifies your network device that you can find with:

$ ifconfig

enjoy!