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run a VirtualBox virtual machine without a gui
you can launch a VirtualBox VM from the command line using VBoxManage, but that invokes it in a gui environment. If you want to just fire off your VM in the background, use VBoxHeadless as shown. To get the names and UUIDs of your VirtualBox VMs, type: $ VBoxManage list

command line to optimize all table from a mysql database

Override and update your locally modified files through cvs..

Watch the progress of 'dd'
run this in another terminal, were xxxx is the process ID of the running dd process. the progress will report on the original terminal that you ran dd on

Rotate a video file by 90 degrees CW
Change video orientation in metadata only

Create AUTH PLAIN string to test SMTP AUTH session
I use this as an alias: alias authplain "printf '\!:1\0\!:1\0\!:2' | mmencode | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/^/AUTH PLAIN /'" then.. # authplain someuser@somedomain.com secretpassword AUTH PLAIN c29tZXVzZXJAc29tZWRvbWFpbi5jb20Ac29tZXVzZXJAc29tZWRvbWFpbi5jb20Ac2VjcmV0cGFzc3dvcmQ= #

Unpack .tgz File On Linux
With -a you don't care about file type (bz2, gzip, etc.)

Convert JSON to YAML
Convert JSON to YAML. Note that you'll need to have PyYaml installed.

Display the standard deviation of a column of numbers with awk

get you public ip address
Relies on ifconfig.me functioning. It's about as easy as it gets, and memorable to old geeks too.


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