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Find the package a command belongs to on debian-based distros
Advanced revision to the command 8776 . This revision follows symbolic links. The quotation-marks surrounding $(which $1) allows for graceful handling of errors ( ie. readlink does not complain incase 'which' command generates (null) output)

list files recursively by size

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
If you want to do the same in OS X... grep as necessary for information you need....

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Remove all unused kernels with apt-get
This should do the same thing and is about 70 chars shorter.

mailx to send mails from console
It is the best way i found to send a mail from the console in my centos server.

Run a command for blocks of output of another command
The given example collects output of the tail command: Whenever a line is emitted, further lines are collected, until no more output comes for one second. This group of lines is then sent as notification to the user. You can test the example with $ logger "First group"; sleep 1; logger "Second"; logger "group"

View any already in progress copy command in detail
If you spot a dubious looking cp command running you can use this command to view what is being copied and to where. 1234 is the PID of the cp command being passed to the lsof utility. 3r.*REG will display the file/directory that is being read/copied. 4w.*REG will display the destination it is being written to.

Close shell keeping all subprocess running

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"


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