If you use FreeBSD, you are undoubtedly familiar with the ports collection and its thousands of easy-to-install utilities and applications.

This article from O'Reilly Press's Onlamp details a number of cool tricks with the system.

Among the tips are:

• How to make a web-browsable set of readmes for the entire set of ports ( cd /usr/ports;make readmes )
• How to easily install ports on many machines by making packages automatically using the make package command.
• Searching ports (using make search key=**keyvalue**, but you already knew that).
• Using pkg_info to determine how much space your ports use (pkg_info -as)
• Using pkg_version to see whether your installed ports are up to date (pkg_version)

Nice article.