Useful Tools and One-liners

Find packages by size

dpigs

dpigs is available in the package debian-goodies. From the Manpage:

dpigs - Show which installed packages occupy the most space 

If you can't install debian-goodies for some reason, you can achieve the same result by this:

dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -nr | head

Or, to read from /var/lib/dpkg/status directly without the need of any tools:

sed -ne '/^Package: \(.*\)/{s//\1/;h;};/^Installed-Size: \(.*\)/{s//\1/;G;s/\n/ /;p;}' /var/lib/dpkg/status | sort -nr | head 

Thanks to this site:

• commandlinefu.com