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Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Using xargs is better than: find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
12

find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

root · 2009-01-26 11:30:47 63
Display PHP files that directly instantiate a given class

This greps all PHP files for a given classname and displays both the file and the usage. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
tao/tests/filter/TestUrl.php:        $this->objFilter = new filter_Url();
tao/classes/local/view/Photos.php:        $objFilter  = new filter_Url();
```
1

find . -name "*.php" -exec grep \-H "new filter_" {} \;

root · 2009-01-26 10:43:09 73
Run the last command as root

Useful when you forget to use sudo for a command. "!!" grabs the last run command.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1219

sudo !!

root · 2009-01-26 10:26:48 262
Creates a customized search command

Creates a command alias ('cr' in the above example) that searches the contents of files matching a set of file extensions (C & C++ source-code in the above example) recursively within the current directory. Search configured to be in colour, ignore-case, show line numbers and show 4 lines of context. Put in shell initialisation file of your choice. Trivially easy to use, e.g: cr sha1_init Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
./openssl/signatures.c-600-xmlSecOpenSSLDsaSha1EvpInit(EVP_MD_CTX *ctx)
./openssl/signatures.c-601-{
./openssl/signatures.c:602:    return SHA1_Init(ctx->md_data);
./openssl/signatures.c-603-}
./openssl/signatures.c-604-
--
./openssl/signatures.c-706-    NULL,
./openssl/signatures.c-707-#else /* XMLSEC_OPENSSL_096 */
./openssl/signatures.c:708:    SHA1_Init,
./openssl/signatures.c-709-    SHA1_Update,
./openssl/signatures.c-710-    SHA1_Final,
```
0

alias cr='find . 2>/dev/null -regex '\''.*\.$c\|cpp\|pc\|h\|hpp\|cc$$'\'' | xargs grep --color=always -ni -C2'

chrisdrew · 2009-01-26 08:54:25 56
Outputs a sorted list of disk usage to a text file

Recursively searches current directory and outputs sorted list of each directory's disk usage to a text file. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
712     .
328     ./test
176     ./lib
144     ./doc
100     ./test/data
96      ./lib/rake
64      ./doc/release_notes
```
6

du | sort -gr > file_sizes

chrisdrew · 2009-01-26 01:12:54 62
Watch how fast the files in a drive are being deleted

This can be useful when a large remove operation is taking place.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
6

watch "df | grep /path/to/drive"

root · 2009-01-25 21:16:41 674
Execute a command at a given time

This is an alternative to cron which allows a one-off task to be scheduled for a certain time.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
266

echo "ls -l" | at midnight

root · 2009-01-25 21:07:42 85
Analyse an Apache access log for the most common IP addresses

This uses awk to grab the IP address from each request and then sorts and summarises the top 10.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
22

tail -10000 access_log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

root · 2009-01-25 21:01:52 47
Add SVN keywords property to all PHP and Javascript files
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

find . $ -name "*.php" -o -name "*.js" $ -exec svn propset svn:keywords Id {} \;

root · 2009-01-24 00:54:35 63
Count files beneath current directory (including subfolders)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
18

find . -type f | wc -l

root · 2009-01-23 17:19:32 74

Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT. Show Sample Output

106

ps aux | sort -nk +4 | tail

root · 2009-01-23 17:12:33 295

Checks all MySQL tables

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/myisamchk.html for further details. You can also repair all tables by running: myisamchk -r *.MYI
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

myisamchk /path/to/mysql/files/*.MYI

root · 2009-01-22 10:20:00 133
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sort a JSON blob

For situations where you keep JSON in a VCS and you want your diffs to be sane, such as within a Chef configuration repo.

Pipe STDOUT to vim

The hyphen tells vim to open from STDOUT - saves having to create temporary files.

List all global top level modles, then remove ALL npm packages with xargs

Create a transition between two videos

We take the first 50 frames of a.mp4 for track a, and 24 blank frames followed by b.mp4 for track b. We then create a transition from track a to track b starting from frame 25 and ending at frame 49. The output is stored in out.mp4 To view the results without saving remove "-consumer avformat:out.mp4" from the end. Documentation of the mlt framework and the melt command can be found here: http://www.mltframework.org/bin/view/MLT/Documentation

List directories sorted by (human readable) size

autossh + ssh + screen = super rad perma-sessions

Only useful for really flakey connections (but im stuck with one for now). Though if youre in this situation ive found this to be a good way to run autossh and it does a pretty good job of detecting when the session is down and restarting. Combined with the -t and screen commands this pops you back into your working session lickety split w/ as few headaches as possible. And if autossh is a bit slow at detecting the downed ssh connection, just run this in another tab/terminal window to notify autossh that it should drop it and start over. Basically for when polling is too slow. kill -SIGUSR1 `pgrep autossh`

Recursive find and replace file extension / suffix (mass rename files)

Find recursively all files in ~/Notes with the extension '.md' and pipe that via xargs to rename command, which will replace every '.md' to '.txt' in this example (existing files will not be overwritten).

Bitcoin Brainwallet Base58 Encoder

A bitcoin "brainwallet" is a secret passphrase you carry in your brain. The Bitcoin Brainwallet Private Key Base58 Encoder is the third of three functions needed to calculate a bitcoin PRIVATE key from your "brainwallet" passphrase. This base58 encoder uses the obase parameter of the amazing bc utility to convert from ASCII-hex to base58. Tech note: bc inserts line continuation backslashes, but the "read s" command automatically strips them out. I hope that one day base58 will, like base64, be added to the amazing openssl utility.

When was your OS installed?

Show time and date when you installed your OS.

Find usb device in realtime

Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

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