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Encode png's into blu-ray format
This command takes a set of images (from a render, for example), and converts them into a format conforming to the Blu-ray spec, or at least the version on the Wikipedia page.

grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power
xargs -P N spawns up to N worker processes. -n 40 means each grep command gets up to 40 file names each on the command line.

Dock Thunderbird in system tray and hide main window
Dock Thunderbird in system tray and hide main window. Very useful for startup scripts. Of course you can dock any app of your choice.

Find the cover image for an album
This bash function uses albumart.org to find the cover for an album. It returns an amazon.com url to the image. Usage: albumart [artist] [album] These arguments can be reversed and if the album name is distinct enough, it may be possible to omit the artist. The command can be extended with wget to automatically download the matching image like this: $ albumart(){ local x y="$@";x=$(awk '/View larger image/{gsub(/^.*largeImagePopup\(.|., .*$/,"");print;exit}'

mysql bin log events per minute
shows number of mysql bin log events (which are mysql server events) per minute, useful to check stress times postmortem

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Get International Space Station sighting information for your city
This command outputs a table of sighting opportunities for the International Space Station. Find the URL for your city here: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

List commands with a short summary
Obviously, you can replace 'man' command with any command in this command line to do useful things. I just want to mention that there is a way to list all the commands which you can execute directly without giving fullpath. Normally all important commands will be placed in your PATH directories. This commandline uses that variable to get commands. Works in Ubuntu, will work in all 'manpage' configured *nix systems.


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