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search ubuntu packages to find which package contains the executable program programname
search ubuntu's remote package source repositories for a specific program to see which package contains it

Show webcam output
Show the webcam output with mplayer.

Rsync a directory excluding pesky .svn dirs

Recompress all files in current directory from gzip to bzip2
Find all .gz files and recompress them to bz2 on the fly. No temp files. edit: forgot the double quotes! jeez!

format txt as table not joining empty columns
-n switch keeps empty columns If your distribution does not ship with a recent column version that supports -n you can use this alternative: perl -pe 's/(^|;);/$1 ;/g' file.csv | column -ts\; | less -S Change the delimiter to your liking.

Nicely display mem usage with ps
Nicely display mem usage with ps.

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"

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.

Downsample mp3s to 128K
This will lower the quality of mp3 files, but is necessary to play them on some mobile devices.

find an unused unprivileged TCP port
perl-less way


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