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Watch how many tcp connections there are per state every two seconds.
slighty shorter

Copy the sound content of a video to an mp3 file
-vn removes tha video content, the copy option tells ffmpeg to use the same codec for generating the output

print line and execute it in BASH
!# is the currennt line so far, by using !#:- you can go from the second arg (it's zero indexed) to the last ($) (did I understand the problem correctly?)

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

OpenDns IP update via curl
Your IP is resolved by OpenDns Server (like a caller ID telephone, every server knows who is calling ;-) Change user:password by yours Be Happy

Execute a command with a timeout
A timeout is great, but what if the command is taking longer than expected because it's hung up or ran into some other problem? That's where the -k option comes in. Run "some_command" and timeout after 30s. If the command is still running after 1 minute, it will receive a kill signal.

DVD ripping with ffmpeg
To rip DVD movie to ogg format using ffmpeg, follow these steps. 1) find the vob files on the mounted video DVD in VIDEO_TS that stores the movie itself. There would be a few other VOB files that stores splash screen or special features, the vob files for the movie itself can be identified by its superior size. You can verify these vob files by playing them directly with a player (e.g. mplayer) 2) concatenate all such vob files, pipe to ffmpeg 3) calculate the video size and crop size. The ogg video size must be multiple of 16 on both width and height, this is inherit limitation of theora codec. In my case I took 512x384. The -vcodec parameter is necessary because ffmpeg doesn't support theora by itself. -acodec is necessary otherwise ffmpeg uses flac by default.

Get information about a video file

Pull up remote desktop for other than gnome/kde eg fluxbox
If the remote doesn't export its desktop (eg fluxbox, blackbox etc) then you need to run a x11vnc server there and a vncviewer at the local end. This command does the lot for you - it assumes that you can 'ssh' to the box without a password and that x11vnc is installed at the remote end.

Join lines and separate with spaces
Read vmargs.txt, which is a text file that could either be DOS-style (\r\n) or UNIX-style (\n) line endings and join the lines with a space separator. Can this be shortened/made more elegant?


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