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find packages installed from e.g. sid which are newer than those available from e.g. testing when sid is no longer present as a source repo
This is useful if you add sid, install some packages, then remove sid and want to work out which packages you installed from sid that should be removed (e.g. before an upgrade to the new stable). Alternatively you can think of this as "find installed packages that can no longer be installed."

easily find megabyte eating files or directories
This is easy to type if you are looking for a few (hundred) "missing" megabytes (and don't mind the occasional K slipping in)... A variation without false positives and also finding gigabytes (but - depending on your keyboard setup - more painful to type): $du -hs *|grep -P '^(\d|,)+(M|G)'|sort -n (NOTE: you might want to replace the ',' according to your locale!) Don't forget that you can modify the globbing as needed! (e.g. '.[^\.]* *' to include hidden files and directories (w/ bash)) in its core similar to: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/706/show-sorted-list-of-files-with-sizes-more-than-1mb-in-the-current-dir

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Search for packages, ranked by popularity
This will take the packages matching a given `apt-cache search` query (a collection of AND'd words or regexps) and tell you how popular they are. This is particularly nice for those times you have to figure out which solution to use for e.g. a PDF reader or a VNC client. Substitute "ubuntu.com" for "debian.org" if you want this to use Ubuntu's data instead. Everything else will work perfectly.

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.

set prompt and terminal title to display hostname, user ID and pwd
used in an if-then-else in case the default shell is ksh, not bash. The $(basename ${0#-}) is handy to echo which shell and strip the dash some flavors put in front of "bash" if [ $(basename ${0#-}) == "bash" ] ; then export PS1='\[\e]0;\h \u \w\a\]\n\[\e[0;34m\]\u@\h \[\e[33m\]\w\[\e[0;32m\]\n\$ ' else HOST=`hostname` ESC=`echo "\033"` BEL=`echo "\007"` RAW=`echo "\r"` export PS1='-${RAW}${ESC}]0;${HOST} ${USER}${BEL}-${ESC}[0;34m${USER}${ESC}[0m@${ESC}[0;34m${HOST%%.*}${ESC}[0;33m${ESC}[0m $ ' fi

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"

Get windows IPv4 and nothing else
May be useful to get user's ip address over the phone, as users struggle to read through a long ipconfig result.

continuously check size of files or directories
very handy if you copy or download a/some file(s) and want to know how big it is at the moment

list files recursively by size


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