Welcome to scratch pad of usefull shell snippets

remove all php4 packages with apt-get

dpkg -l | grep php4 | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs apt-get remove -y

use socat as simple serial program

socat - /dev/ttyS0,b9600,echo=0,raw

list first ten files from srchives

ls *.tar.gz *.tgz | xargs -i sh -c "ls -hs '{}' ; echo ; tar tvfz '{}' | head -10 ; echo"

ls *.tar.bz2 *.tbz | xargs -i sh -c "ls -hs '{}' ; echo ; tar tvfj '{}' | head -10 ; echo"

Yes, it sucks that tar doesn't know how to handle compression formats automatically...