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parse html/stdin with lynx
strips html from stdin

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Simple Video Surveillance by email
This takes a picture (with the web cam) every 5 minutes, and send the picture to your e-mail. Some systems support mail -a "References: " so that all video surveillance emails are grouped in a single email thread. To keep your inbox clean, it is still possible to filter and move to trash video surveillance emails (and restore these emails only if you really get robbed!) For instance with Gmail, emails sent to me+trash@gmail.com can be filtered with "Matches: DeliveredTo:me+trash@gmail.com"

convert wav files to flac
cd to the folder containing the wav files, then convert them all to flac. yeah baby! in ubuntu, to get the flac program just: sudo apt-get install flac flac file input formats are wav, aiff, raw, flac, oga and ogg

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Pronounce an English word using Merriam-Webster.com
Looks up a word on merriam-webster.com, does a screen scrape for the FIRST audio pronunciation and plays it. USAGE: Put this one-liner into a shell script (e.g., ~/bin/pronounce) and run it from the command line giving it the word to say: $ pronounce lek If the word isn't found in merriam-webster, no audio is played and the script returns an error value. However, M-W is a fairly complete dictionary (better than howjsay.com which won't let you hear how to pronounce naughty words). ASSUMPTIONS: GNU's sed (which supports -r for extended regular expressions) and Linux's aplay. Aplay can be replaced by any program that can play .WAV files from stdin. KNOWN BUGS: only the FIRST pronunciation is played, which is problematic if you wanted a particular form (plural, adjectival, etc) of the word. For example, if you run this: $ pronounce onomatopoetic you'll hear a voice saying "onomatopoeia". Playing the correct form of the word is possible, but doing so might make the screen scraper even more fragile than it already is. (The slightest change to the format of m-w.com could break it).

FizzBuzz in Perl
Just another FizzBuzz in Perl.

send substituted text to a command without echo, pipe
zsh only - This avoids the need for echo "message" | which creates an entire subshell. Also, the text you are most likely to edit is at the very end of the line, which, in my opinion, makes it slightly easier to edit.

Get full directory path of a script regardless of where it is run from
Also resolves symlinks, showing the full path of the link target

Number of files in a SVN Repository
This command will output the total number of files in a SVN Repository.


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