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Tune your guitar from the command line.
This command, taken from play's manual page, plays a synthesized guitar tone for each of the strings on a standard tuned guitar. The command "play" is a part of the package "sox".

Pulls email password out of Plesk database for given email address.
This simply pulls the password out of the database for the given mail name for ease of use in testing emails that you would not normally have access to.

Get your Tweets from the command line
Gets the latest Tweets in your friends timeline from Twitter. Uses curl and xmlstarlet.

External IP (raw data)

Limit the cpu usage of a process
Similar to `cpulimit`, although `prlimit` can be found shipped with recent util-linux. Example: limit CPU consumption to 10% for a math problem which ordinarily takes up 100% CPU: Before: $ bc -l

Check if a package is installed. If it is, the version number will be shown.
If the first two letters are "ii", then the package is installed. You can also use wildcards. For example, . $ dpkg -l openoffice* . Note that dpkg will usually not report packages which are available but uninstalled. If you want to see both which versions are installed and which versions are available, use this command instead: . $ apt-cache policy python

find external links in all html files in a directory list
Just a handy way to get all the unique links from inside all the html files inside a directory. Can be handy on scripts etc.

Get table column names from an MySQL-database in comma-seperated form

Get me yesterday's date, even if today is 1-Mar-2008 and yesterday was 29-Feb-2008
Fool date by setting the timezone out by 24 hours and you get yesterday's date. Try TZ=XYZ-24 to get tomorrow's date. I live in TZ=GMT0BST so you might need to shift the number 24 by the hours in your timezone.

Display a cool clock on your terminal
This command displays a clock on your terminal which updates the time every second. Press Ctrl-C to exit. A couple of variants: A little bit bigger text: $ watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet -f big" You can try other figlet fonts, too. Big sideways characters: $ watch -n 1 -t '/usr/games/banner -w 30 $(date +%M:%S)' This requires a particular version of banner and a 40-line terminal or you can adjust the width ("30" here).


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