I really like mtr (the traceroute tool), however, it always bugged me that it launches a GUI app instead of using the curses interface. You can easily pass the “-t” or “–curses” flag to default to the curses interface, but I always forget.
So today I set about writing a patch for mtr to read a environment varable to force the curses interface. While I was reading the source I noticed there was already a simple undocumented way!
export MTR_OPTIONS=-t
Voila the curses interface is now used by default. This is certainly going into my ~/.bashrc