How to get a complete list of packages that are installed on your system

dpkg --get-selections

will show you a complete list of packages installed on your Ubuntu system

and
rpm -qa
will give you the complete list on a Fedora / Redhat /CentOS system

since these lists are long its a good idea to pipe them to less

dpkg --get-selections | less

and
rpm -qa | less

Get Counted (The Linux Counter)

http://counter.li.org/

Argument list too long

Today I was limited by rm

I needed to clean up a folder by deleting previous years (2008) log files which amounted to a few thousand files

rm logs-2008*

returned me the error
/bin/rm:Argument too long

The reason for this error is a limitation of your running kernel and will limit you to other commands as well. Like mv and cp, if the amount of files you want to act on is larger than the set limitation.

a work around is to pipe the matching files to rm one at a time.
To do this, issue the following command

find -name 'log2008*' | xargs rm (substitute 'log2008*' for your search string)

If the files you are trying to remove have spaces in them, then you need to use the following command

find -name 'log2008*' | -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Static Routes

To add a static route to say the 10.10.1.0/24 network from your machine through your gateway router who's IP is 192.168.1.1


route add -net 10.10.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.1.1 dev eth0

will add the route to your kernel and it will be available immediately. However this will not survive a reboot.
To make this persistent after a reboot you need to input the route into a configuration file

on Ubuntu edit

/etc/network/interfaces

and Red hat / Centos / Fedora

edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-eth0

if the route-eth0 file file does not exist (it probably won't) then create it
and add the following

10.10.1.0/24 via 192.168.1.1

save the file and then restart networking to read in the new route
/etc/init.d/networking restart