<p>Anyone know of a free xls to text converter that can be run from the unix command line?</p>

A quick search of
```
apt-cache
```
turned up the
Ubuntu package python-excelerator
for
excelerator
, which includes
```
py_xls2html
```
,
```
py_xls2csv
```
and
```
py_xls2txt
```
utlities. Will this work for you?