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Google text-to-speech in mp3 format
same but redirecting to player and putting whaever text line.. works on my ubuntu machine ...

find the biggest files recursively, no matter how many
This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit. This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

Clone perms and owner group from one file to another
Copy both perms and owner group from one file to another.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Format date/time string for a different day
The "date' command has options to easily format the date, day, month, time, etc. But what if you want a relative date or time. Like, I wanted yesterday's date in a particular format. You may want the exact date of "2 months ago" or "-3 days" nicely formatted. For that, you can use this command. The --date option takes fuzzy parameters like the ones mentioned in the previous sentence.

listen to an offensive fortune
or replace "espeak" with "festival --tts" if you like festival better when your buddy leaves his computer unlocked use "crontab" or "at" to play at some time that would be most embarassing (during his next sales presentation) $ echo "fortune -o | espeak" | at now + 30 minutes of course you can exclude the "-o" for non offensive fortunes, or if you don't have offensive fortunes installed

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" }

Draw kernel module dependancy graph.
parse "lsmod" output to "dot" format and pass it to "display". Without perl!

Simulate slow network connection locally
Replace 500ms by the desired delay. To remove it: sudo tc qdisc del dev lo root netem delay 500ms


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