Commands tagged merriam-webster (2)

  • Pronounce an English word using Merriam-Webster.com

    The original was a little bit too complicated for me. This one does not use any variables.


    5
    pronounce(){ wget -qO- $(wget -qO- "http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/$@" | grep 'return au' | sed -r "s|.*return au\('([^']*)', '([^'])[^']*'\).*|http://cougar.eb.com/soundc11/\2/\1|") | aplay -q; }
    matthewbauer · 2010-03-12 17:44:16 6
  • Pronounce an English word using Merriam-Webster.com

    Looks up a word on merriam-webster.com, does a screen scrape for the FIRST audio pronunciation and plays it. USAGE: Put this one-liner into a shell script (e.g., ~/bin/pronounce) and run it from the command line giving it the word to say: pronounce lek If the word isn't found in merriam-webster, no audio is played and the script returns an error value. However, M-W is a fairly complete dictionary (better than howjsay.com which won't let you hear how to pronounce naughty words). ASSUMPTIONS: GNU's sed (which supports -r for extended regular expressions) and Linux's aplay. Aplay can be replaced by any program that can play .WAV files from stdin. KNOWN BUGS: only the FIRST pronunciation is played, which is problematic if you wanted a particular form (plural, adjectival, etc) of the word. For example, if you run this: pronounce onomatopoetic you'll hear a voice saying "onomatopoeia". Playing the correct form of the word is possible, but doing so might make the screen scraper even more fragile than it already is. (The slightest change to the format of m-w.com could break it). Show Sample Output


    3
    cmd=$(wget -qO- "http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/$(echo "$@"|tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')" | sed -rn "s#return au\('([^']+?)', '([^'])[^']*'\);.*#\nwget -qO- http://cougar.eb.com/soundc11/\2/\1 | aplay -q#; s/[^\n]*\n//p"); [ "$cmd" ] && eval "$cmd" || exit 1
    hackerb9 · 2010-03-12 13:56:41 3

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands

Check These Out

Audible warning when a downloading is finished
This command can be set as an alias in ~/.bashrc For example (in my case) I have : alias watchDl='while [ "$(ls $filePart)" != "" ]; do sleep 5; done; mpg123 /home/.../warning.mp3" ' Then I just need to - initialize filePart (e.g. filePart="*bigFile*rar.part") - launch watchDl

In (any) vi, add a keystroke to format the current paragraph.
That goes into your $HOME/.exrc file. " Nice macro to reformat lines: map ^A !}fmt Note that the ^A has to be input by typing ^V^A.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Renaming a file without overwiting an existing file name
Sometimes in a hurry you may move or copy a file using an already existent file name. If you aliased the cp and mv command with the -i option you are prompted for a confirmation before overwriting but if your aliases aren't there you will loose the target file! The -b option will force the mv command to check if the destination file already exists and if it is already there a backup copy with an ending ~ is created.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

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

Create a bunch of dummy files for testing
Sometimes I need to create a directory of files to operate on to test out some commandlinefu I am cooking up. The main thing is the range ({1..N}) expansion.

Convert a bunch of HTML files from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 file encoding in a folder and all sub-folders
This is my first attempt at converting all HTML files to UTF-8 file encoding, including all subfolders. Theres probably a much more compact way to do it, but I'm quite proud of it with my windows background ;)

Ping all hosts on 192.168.1.0/24

Lines per second in a log file
Another way of counting the line output of tail over 10s not requiring pv. Cut to have the average per second rate : tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 10; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2 You can also enclose it in a loop and send stderr to /dev/null : while true; do tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 2; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2; done 2>/dev/null

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: