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Append stdout and stderr to a file, and print stderr to the screen [bash]
Useful for cron jobs -- all output will be logged but only errors will cause email to be sent. NB the order of "2>&1" and ">> logfile" is important, it doesn't work if you reverse them (everything goes to the logfile, nothing left for tee).

Gets the english pronunciation of a phrase
Sends a string to google tranlator, which converts it to English speech. It's possible to create a nice script to do the job for us, such as #!/bin'bash curl -A "Mozilla" "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=$1" > /tmp/speak.mp3 mplayer /tmp/speak.mp3

Generate binary sequence data

Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

Restore mysql database uncompressing on the fly.
This way you keep the file compressed saving disk space. Other way less optimal using named pipes: mysql -uroot -p'passwd' database <

Press Any Key to Continue
Halt script progress until a key has been pressed. Source: http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/mirroring/bashfaq/065

Empty a file

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Kill process by pid
To kill a process in windows by using the PID. Change 10728 to the PID of the process you want to kill.

Extract .tar.lzma archive


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