Verbose mode for linux filesystem commands
Most of the most used basic commands (cp, mv, chown, chmod) have a verbose flag (v) which is very convenient to check what is going on without looking to the filesystem.
# create a directory
mkdir -v -m 0700 /tmp/test
# mkdir: created directory 'test'
chown -v vagrant:vagrant /tmp/test
# changed ownership of '/tmp/test' from root:root to vagrant:vagrant