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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

Fulltext search in multiple OCR'd pdfs

Report all quota usage
Check disk quota for all user

Check for login failures and summarize
This command checks for the number of times when someone has tried to login to your server and failed. If there are a lot, then that user is being targeted on your system and you might want to make sure that user either has remote logins disabled, or has a strong password, or both. If your output has an "invalid" line, it is a summary of all logins from users that don't exist on your system.

Delete line number 10 from file
Very useful when the ssh key of a host has changed and ssh refuses to connect to the machine, while giving you the line number that has changed in ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

Convert a file from ISO-8859-1 (or whatever) to UTF-8 (or whatever)
I use it sometimes when I work on a french file transferred from a windows XP to a Debian-UTF8 system. Those are not correctly displayed: ? ? ? and so on $man tcs # for all charsets

Delete all files older than X in given path
This will find all files under the path "." which are older than 10 days, and delete them. If you wish to use the "rm" command instead, replace "-delete" with "-exec rm [options] {} \;"

Commandline document conversion with Libreoffice
In this example, the docx gets converted to Open Document .odt format. For other formats, you'll need to specify the correct filter (Hint: see "Comments" link below for a nice list).

Generate random valid mac addresses
Shorter and more straightforward. Also in perl: $ perl -e 'print join(":", map { sprintf "%0.2X",rand(256) }(1..6))."\n"'

Function that outputs dots every second until command completes
Very useful in shell scripts because you can run a task nicely in the background using job-control and output progress until it completes. Here's an example of how I use it in backup scripts to run gpg in the background to encrypt an archive file (which I create in this same way). $! is the process ID of the last run command, which is saved here as the variable PI, then sleeper is called with the process id of the gpg task (PI), and sleeper is also specified to output : instead of the default . every 3 seconds instead of the default 1. So a shorter version would be sleeper $!; The wait is also used here, though it may not be needed on your system. $ echo ">>> ENCRYPTING SQL BACKUP" $ gpg --output archive.tgz.asc --encrypt archive.tgz 1>/dev/null & $ PI=$!; sleeper $PI ":" 3; wait $PI && rm archive.tgz &>/dev/null Previously to get around the $! not always being available, I would instead check for the existance of the process ID by checking if the directory /proc/$PID existed, but not everyone uses proc anymore. That version is currently the one at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html but I plan on upgrading to this new version soon.


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