-n reads input, line by line, in a loop sending to $_ Equivalent to while () { mycode } -e execute the following quoted string (i.e. do the following on the same line as the perl command) the elipses .. operator behaves like a range, remembering the state from line to line.

This is a good alternative to pdf2text for Ubuntu. To install it: sudo apt-get install python-pdfminer

sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 50KByte/s Set the bandwidth (bw) limit to any number you want. For example you could have a 15kb pipe for X application and then a 100kb pipe for another application and attach things to those pipes. If a port isn’t attached to a pipe, it runs at full speed. Change the number (in this case 1) to a different number for a different pipe. The next step is to attach your port. sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80 In this case anything on port 80 (http) will be set to a limit of 50Kbyte/s. If you want to attach a second port to this pipe, repeat the command but change the port number at the end. src : http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/12/throttling-bandwidth-on-a-mac.html

Records audio from your mic in FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format, starts only after it detects at least 0.1 seconds of noise and stops after 1 second of silence. You can adjust the percent values (sensitivity) to best fit your microphone and voice (0.1% if you have a great quality mic, higher if you don't, 0% does not trim anything). Useful for speech recognition in conjunction with my previous command titled 'Google voice recognition "API"' (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/8043/google-voice-recognition-api).

Unset TMOUT or set it to 0 in order to prevent shell autologout. TMOUT is the number of seconds after which the present shell will be killed if it has been idle for that long.

fade [type] fade-in-length [stop-time [fade-out-length]] Apply a fade effect to the beginning, end, or both of the audio. An optional type can be specified to select the shape of the fade curve: q for quarter of a sine wave, h for half a sine wave, t for linear (`triangular') slope, l for logarithmic, and p for inverted parabola. The default is logarithmic. A fade-in starts from the first sample and ramps the signal level from 0 to full volume over fade-in-length sec? onds. Specify 0 seconds if no fade-in is wanted. For fade-outs, the audio will be truncated at stop-time and the signal level will be ramped from full volume down to 0 starting at fade-out-length seconds before the stop-time. If fade-out-length is not specified, it defaults to the same value as fade-in-length. No fade-out is performed if stop-time is not specified. If the file length can be determined from the input file header and length-changing effects are not in effect, then 0 may be specified for stop-time to indicate the usual case of a fade-out that ends at the end of the input audio stream. All times can be specified in either periods of time or sample counts. To specify time periods use the format hh:mm:ss.frac format. To specify using sample counts, specify the number of samples and append the letter `s' to the sample count (for example `8000s').

Generate a random MAC address with capital letters

Referring to the original post, if you are using $! then that means the process is a child of the current shell, so you can just use `wait $!`. If you are trying to wait for a process created outside of the current shell, then the loop on `kill -0 $PID` is good; although, you can't get the exit status of the process.