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Tar - Compress by excluding folders
If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space. Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting. This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".

Short Information about loaded kernel modules
Liked command 4077 so I improved it, by doing all text manipulation with sed. "Run this as root, it will be helpful to quickly get information about the loaded kernel modules." THX mohan43u

Remount root in read-write mode.
Saved my day, when my harddrive got stuck in read-only mode.

Sort the size usage of a directory tree by gigabytes, kilobytes, megabytes, then bytes.
Since coreutils 7.6 provides sort -h

Shows what processes need to be restarted after system upgrade
emerge,apt-get,yum... all update your system. This will at some point replace either a runtime dependency or a process (which is still running). This oneliner will list what processes need to be restarted

Watch the progress of 'dd'
The 'dd' command doesn't provide a progress when writing data. So, sending the "USR1" signal to the process will spit out its progress as it writes data. This command is superior to others on the site, as it doesn't require you to previously know the PID of the dd command.

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"

find your release version of your ubuntu / debian distro

Verbosely delete files matching specific name pattern, older than 15 days.

Figure out what shell you're running


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