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Force the script to be started as root
Will run the script as root and exit if the wrong or no password is given. Also will keep the parameters active if any where given.

multiline data block parse and CSV data extraction with perl
extract data in multiline blocks of data with perl pattern matching loop

Working random fact generator
Though without infinite time and knowledge of how the site will be designed in the future this may stop working, it still will serve as a simple straight forward starting point. This uses the observation that the only item marked as strong on the page is the single logical line that includes the italicized fact. If future revisions of the page show failure, or intermittent failure, one may simply alter the above to read. $ wget randomfunfacts.com -O - 2>/dev/null | tee lastfact | grep \ | sed "s;^.*\(.*\).*$;\1;" The file lastfact, can then be examined whenever the command fails.

Execute a command with a timeout

List the Sizes of Folders and Directories
I wanted an easy way to list out the sizes of directories and all of the contents of those directories recursively.

Get just the IP for a hostname
has the benefit of being a bit more cross-platform.

Using ASCII Art output on MPlayer
Not so useful. Just a cool feature.

get cookies from firefox
useful to use after with the --load-cookies option of wget

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Limit the transfer rate of a pipe with pv
-L RATE, --rate-limit RATE Limit the transfer to a maximum of RATE bytes per second. A suffix of "k", "m", "g", or "t" can be added to denote kilobytes (*1024), megabytes, and so on. It must be an integer.


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