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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 64
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 77
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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Print all environment variables, including hidden ones

This uses some tricks I found while reading the bash man page to enumerate and display all the current environment variables, including those not listed by the 'env' command which according to the bash docs are more for internal use by BASH. The main trick is the way bash will list all environment variable names when performing expansion on ${!A*}. Then the eval builtin makes it work in a loop. I created a function for this and use it instead of env. (by aliasing env). This is the function that given any parameters lists the variables that start with it. So 'aae B' would list all env variables starting wit B. And 'aae {A..Z} {a..z}' would list all variables starting with any letter of the alphabet. And 'aae TERM' would list all variables starting with TERM. $ aae(){ local __a __i __z;for __a in "$@";do __z=\${!${__a}*};for __i in `eval echo "${__z}"`;do echo -e "$__i: ${!__i}";done;done; } And my printenv replacement is: $ alias env='aae {A..Z} {a..z} "_"|sort|cat -v 2>&1 | sed "s/\\^\\[/\\\\033/g"' From: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

find out how many days since given date

You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

Wait for file to stop changing

This loop will finish if a file hasn't changed in the last 10 seconds. . It checks the file's modification timestamp against the clock. If 10 seconds have elapsed without any change to the file, then the loop ends. . This script will give a false positive if there's a 10 second delay between updates, e.g. due to network congestion . How does it work? 'date +%s' gives the current time in seconds 'stat -c %Y' gives the file's last modification time in seconds '$(( ))' is bash's way of doing maths '[ X -lt 10 ]' tests the result is Less Than 10 otherwise sleep for 1 second and repeat . Note: Clever as this script is, inotify is smarter.

Generate a 18 character password, print the password and sha512 salted hash

Generate a 18 character password from character set a-zA-Z0-9 from /dev/urandom, pipe the output to Python which prints the password on standard out and in crypt sha512 form.

launch bash without using any letters

ry4an@four:~$ echo $SHLVL 1 ry4an@four:~$ ${0/-/} ry4an@four:~$ echo $SHLVL 2

Quickly Encrypt a file with gnupg and email it with mailx

This is a quick and easy way of encrypting files in a datastream, without ever really creating an output file from gpg. Useful with cron also, when file(s) have to be sent based on a set schedule.

Advanced python tracing

Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS

Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

vim's pastetoggle: when you press f9 'paste' is on , press f9 again and 'paste' is off, and so forth (works in insert-mode and command-mode)

copy with progress bar - rsync

-r for recursive (if you want to copy entire directories) src for the source file (or wildcards) dst for the destination --progress to show a progress bar

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