Tip #828 Sorting debian packages installed by size
The command below will give a list of the packages installed on a debian system sorted from smallest to largest (the order can be reveresed by adding an 'r' option to sort - 'sort -k2 -nr').Read more »
Tip #819 List 10 biggest files in a directory
The commmands below show the ten largest files/dirs in the working directory. Both commands give similar results, though handle things slightly differently. The 'du' option is good if you also need sizes of subdirectories, but the 'ls' option gives more detail.Read more »
Tip #742 Sort the lines of a file by length
The command below can be used to sort the lines of a file by ascending order (shortest first). Change 'sort -n' to 'sort -nr' to sort in descending order (longest first).Read more »
Tip #557 Randomize lines in a file
The bash shell has a variable called $RANDOM, which outputs a pseudo-random number every time you call it. This allows you to randomize the lines in a file for example:Read more »
Tip #528 Top ten running processes
Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usageps aux | sort -nk +4 | tail
ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT. Read more »
Tip #275 Get an ordered list of subdirectory sizes
This piece of code lists the size of every file and subdirectory of the current directory, much like du -sch ./* except the output is sorted by size, with larger files and directories at the end of the list. Useful to find where all that space goes.Read more »
Tip #259 Ghetto lsof when you don
You might want to get rid of the awk, sort, uniq and grep depending on how much info you need.Read more »
Tip #258 List non-system users
I use the following to list non-system users. It should be portable though won't work on systems without the getent command.Read more »
Tip #247 See your favorite commands
Use the following to see the commands you use most often based on your shell history:Read more »
alias aptitude at awk bash bc cal cat cd colrm comm cp csh curl cut date dd df dialog diff dirname dpkg du fc find fuser grep gs gzip history iconv kill ksh last less ln ls lsof lynx m4 md5sum mkdir mkfifo mkisofs mv mysql nc netstat openssl OSX perl ping popd ps pushd python read redirection rm scp screen sed sort ssh stat sudo svn tail tar tee test top tr uniq vim wc wget xargs