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Steve Reich - Piano Phase; interpreter: Bourne-Again Shell.
The Piano Phase piece, by Steve Reich is a minimalist composition which is played on two pianos played at slightly different tempos, a task that's very difficult to accomplish by human players. The auditive effects produced by the cell displacement produce beautiful patterns. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Phase . My rendered version: https://ydor.org/SteveReich/piano_phase.mp3 Requires sox to be installed on the system. There are multiple videos on youtube showing different approaches and experiences to this interpretation. There is also a synthesized version. Even if Bash can behave as a powerful pianist, a simple threaded version leaves full room to several time glitches and even negative displacements, the same issues that human pianists experience when playing the piece. The older the computer, the better the chaos added to the result due to the CPU load. Apparently that's the reason Steve Reich composes pieces such as this. Without further ado, please give a warm welcome to the Bash minimalist player on synthesized two-threaded pianos. Please turn off your cellphones.

Download all images from a website in a single folder

Console clock
Shows a simple clock in the console -t param removes the watch header Ctrl-c to exit

Open Remote Desktop (RDP) from command line and connect local resources
The above command will open a Remote Desktop connection from command line, authenticate using default username and password (great for virtual machines; in the exampe above it's administrator:password), create a shared folder between your machine and the other machine and configure resolution to best fit your desktop (I don't like full screen because it make the desktop panels to disappear). The command will run in the background, and expect to receive parameters. You should enter hostname or IP address as a parameter to the command, and can also override the defaults parameters with your own.

Change prompt to MS-DOS one (joke)
This one eliminates the additional backslash at the end (which is not necessary)

Return threads count of a process
Source: http://superuser.com/questions/49408/how-do-i-monitor-or-view-the-thread-count-of-a-certain-process-on-aix

Console clock
You will see it on the corner of your running terminal.

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs
Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

Print a row of 50 hyphens
Get there by going backwards and forgetting the numbers.

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)
A shell function using perl to easily convert Unix-time to text. Put in in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent. Tested on Linux / Solaris Bourne, bash and zsh. using perl 5.6 and higher. (Does not require GNU date like some other commands)


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