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convert from hexidecimal or octal to decimal
Bash can accept '0x' and '0' notation for hexidecimal and octal numbers, so you just have to output the values.

list files recursively by size

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

Ping Twitter to check if you can connect
Returns a JSON object, by connecting to the 'test' endpoint of the Twitter API. Simplest way to check if you can connect to Twitter. Output also available in XML, use '/help/test.xml' for that

Steve Reich - Piano Phase; interpreter: Bourne-Again Shell.
The Piano Phase piece, by Steve Reich is a minimalist composition which is played on two pianos played at slightly different tempos, a task that's very difficult to accomplish by human players. The auditive effects produced by the cell displacement produce beautiful patterns. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Phase . My rendered version: https://ydor.org/SteveReich/piano_phase.mp3 Requires sox to be installed on the system. There are multiple videos on youtube showing different approaches and experiences to this interpretation. There is also a synthesized version. Even if Bash can behave as a powerful pianist, a simple threaded version leaves full room to several time glitches and even negative displacements, the same issues that human pianists experience when playing the piece. The older the computer, the better the chaos added to the result due to the CPU load. Apparently that's the reason Steve Reich composes pieces such as this. Without further ado, please give a warm welcome to the Bash minimalist player on synthesized two-threaded pianos. Please turn off your cellphones.

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Get the version of sshd on a remote system
I used this to confirm an upgrade to an SSH daemon was successful

Simulate typing

Check if a package is installed. If it is, the version number will be shown.
If the first two letters are "ii", then the package is installed. You can also use wildcards. For example, . $ dpkg -l openoffice* . Note that dpkg will usually not report packages which are available but uninstalled. If you want to see both which versions are installed and which versions are available, use this command instead: . $ apt-cache policy python

A fun thing to do with ram is actually open it up and take a peek. This command will show you all the string (plain text) values in ram


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