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cycle through everything sox knows how to read, playing only the first three seconds
I wasted two hours reading the sox documentation and searching on the web for the format of some obscure fscking sound sample, and then finally came up with this. This plays only the first three seconds of your unknown formatted sound file using every one of sox's built-in filetypes. If you don't get an exact match, you may get close. . I could not fit every single type in and keep it under 127 characters, so you will have to replace "..." with the full list obtainable by `$ sox --help` (or try `Show sample output`) . note: /usr/bin/play should be linked to sox on most systems.

positions the mysql slave at a specific master position
say you want to reinitialize the slave database without resetting the master positions. You stop the slave, dump the master database with --master-data=2 then execute the command on the slave and wait for it to stop at the exact position of the dump. reinit the slave db and start the slave. enjoy.

get a rough estimate about how much disk space is used by all the currently installed debian packages
The vaule is expressed in megabytes

tar and remove files which are older that 100 days
tar does not have a -mtime option as find. tar appends all the file to an existing tar file.

Extract a bash function
I often need to extract a function from a bash script and this command will do it.

Set Time Zone in Ubuntu
Reconfigures time zone in Ubuntu, which I cannot figure out how to do through the GUI. Worked like a charm to set my time zone to CEST from EDT.

Google text-to-speech in mp3 format
Usage: t2s 'How are you?' Nice because it automatically names the mp3 file up to 15 characters Modified (uses bash manip instead of tr) t2s() { wget -q -U Mozilla -O $(cut -b 1-15

socat TCP-LISTEN:5500 EXEC:'ssh user@remotehost "socat STDIO UNIX-CONNECT:/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock"'
Listens on local port 5500 and connects to remotehost with username user to tunnel the given socket file. Will work with anything, but can be useful if there's a need for a local application to connect with a remote server which was started without networking.

Download an entire website from a specific folder on down

Stream audio over ssh
This will allow you to convert an audio file to wav format, and send it via ssh to a player on the other computer, which will open and play it there. Of course, substitute your information for the sound file and remote address You do not have to use paplay on the remote end, as it is a PulseAudio thing. If the remote end uses ALSA, you should use aplay instead. If it uses OSS, you should berate them about having a lousy sound system. Also, you're not limited to transmitting encoded as wav either, it's just that AFAIK, most systems don't come with mp3 codecs, but will play wav files fine. If you know SoX is installed on the remote end and has mp3 codecs, you can use the following instead: $ cat Klaxon.mp3 |ssh thelab@company.com play -t mp3 - this will transmit as mp3. Again, use your specific information. if you're not playing mp3s, use another type with the -t option


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