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Make ogg file from wav file
Make ogg file from wav file

All what exists in dir B and not in dir A will be copied from dir B to new or existing dir C
Assumed dir A, B, C are subdirs of the current dir Exact syntax of the command is: rsync -v -r --size-only --compare-dest=/path_to_A/A/ /path_to_B/B/ /path_to_C/C/ (do not omit end-slashes, since that would copy only the names and not the contents of subdirs of dir B to dir C) You can replace --size-only with --checksum for more thorough file differences validation Useful switch: -n, --dry-run perform a trial run with no changes made

Find the package that installed a command

Find the annual salary of any White House staffer.
Query the Socrata Open Data API being used by the White House to find any employee's salary using curl, grep and awk. Change the value of the search parameter (example uses Axelrod) to the name of any White House staffer to see their annual salary.

Securely destroy data on given device hugely faster than /dev/urandom
This command generates a pseudo-random data stream using aes-256-ctr with a seed set by /dev/urandom. Redirect to a block device for secure data scrambling.

convert uppercase filenames in current directory to lowercase
as commented by Urk...

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Create the oauth token required for a Twitter stream feed
This is the THIRD in a set of five commands. See my other commands for the previous two. This step creates the oauth 1.0 token as explained in http://oauth.net/core/1.0/ The token is required for a Twitter filtered stream feed (and almost all Twitter API calls) This token is simply an encrypted version of your base string. The encryption key used is your hmac. The last part of the command scans the Base64 token string for '+', '/', and '=' characters and converts them to percentage-hex escape codes. (URI-escapeing). This is also a good example of where the $() syntax of Bash command substitution fails, while the backtick form ` works - the right parenthesis in the case statement causes a syntax error if you try to use the $() syntax here. See my previous two commands step1 and step2 to see how the base string variable $b and hmac variable $hmac are generated.

List processes playing sound
When trying to play a sound you may sometimes get an error saying that your sound card is already used, but not by what process. This will list all processes playing sound, useful to kill processes that you no longer need but that keep using your sound card.

Efficiently print a line deep in a huge log file
Sed stops parsing at the match and so is much more effecient than piping head into tail or similar. Grab a line range using $ sed '999995,1000005!d' < my_massive_file


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