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Compute the average number of KB per file for each dir
Use this to find identify if dirs mostly contain large or small files.

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 specific versions of old kernels (Ubuntu/Debian)
If, for example, you want to remove all kernels and headers but the last three versions, you can't use one of that magic all-in-one "remove old stuff" commands. With this simple but elegant command you can remove a range of versions, or a list of versions with e.g. {14,16,20}.

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
This captures traffic on a remote machine with tshark, sends the raw pcap data over the ssh link, and displays it in wireshark. Hitting ctrl+C will stop the capture and unfortunately close your wireshark window. This can be worked-around by passing -c # to tshark to only capture a certain # of packets, or redirecting the data through a named pipe rather than piping directly from ssh to wireshark. I recommend filtering as much as you can in the tshark command to conserve bandwidth. tshark can be replaced with tcpdump thusly: $ ssh root@example.com tcpdump -w - 'port !22' | wireshark -k -i -

Creates a SSHFS volume on MacOS X (better used as an alias). Needs FuseFS and SSHFS (obvioulsly).
To make it even more practical, make sure you can login to the ssh server using a keypair.

add a gpg key to aptitute package manager in a ubuntu system
when we add a new package to a aptitude (the debian package manager) we need to add the gpg, otherwise it will show warning / error for missing key

change dinosaur poop into gold
if firefox is running the database is locked, so you need to copy the places.sqlite file temporarily somewhere to be able to query it...

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Ping all hosts on 192.168.1.0/24

Suppress output of loud commands you don't want to hear from
This works even if there are spaces in any word in the command line.


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