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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 75
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 10:26:48 263
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 86
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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perl one-liner to get the current week number

Not perl but shorter.

Compress and store the image of a disk over the network

Create an image of "device" and send it to another machine through the network ("target" and "port" sets the ip and port the stream will be sent to), outputting a progress bar On the machine that will receive, compress and store the file, use: $nc -l -p | 7z a -si -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -ms=on Optionally, add the -v4g switch at the end of the line in order to split the file every 4 gigabytes (or set another size: accepted suffixes are k, m and g). The file will be compressed using 7z format, lzma2 algorithm, with maximum compression level and solid file activated. The compression stage will be executed on the machine which will store the image. It was planned this way because the processor on that machine was faster, and being on a gigabit network, transfering the uncompressed image wasn't much of a problem.

Add timestamp to history

History usually only gives the command number and the command. This will add a timestamp to the history file. Note: this will only put the correct timestamp on commands used after the export is done. You may want to put this in your .bashrc

Takes and displays screenshot of Android phone over adb.

Dependencies on phone: adb access, screencap command, base64 command. Dependencies on computer: adb, sed, base64, display (from imagemagick, but can substitute other image viewer which reads from stdin). This should work around adb stupidies (i.e. that it replaces \n with \r\n) with base64.

find out how much space are occuipied by files smaller than 1024K (sic) - improved

The original didn't use -print0 which fails on weird file names eg with spaces. The original parsed the output of 'ls -l' which is always a bad idea.

Print CPU load in percent

Faster then all other commands here at cmdlinefu with the same purpose.

Download and install the newest dropbox beta

Get last sleep time on a Mac

Similarly for last wake time: $ sysctl -a | grep waketime

Recursively unrar into dir containing archive

From the cwd, recursively find all rar files, extracting each rar into the directory where it was found, rather than cwd. A nice time saver if you've used wget or similar to mirror something, where each sub dir contains an rar archive. Its likely this can be tuned to work with multi-part archives where all parts use ambiguous .rar extensions but I didn't test this. Perhaps unrar would handle this gracefully anyway?

Switch to the previous branch used in git(1)

Very useful if you keep switching between the same two branches all the time.

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