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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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List contents of jar

useful to find the list of dependencies

Quick directory bookmarks

Set a bookmark as normal shell variable $ p=/cumbersome/path/to/project To go there $ to p This saves one "$" and is faster to type ;-) The variable is still useful as such: $ vim $p/ will expand the variable (at least in bash) and show a list of files to edit. If setting the bookmarks is too much typing you could add another function $ bm() { eval $1=$(pwd); } then bookmark the current directory with $ bm p

search office documents for credit card numbers and social security number SSN docx xlsx

# CC with SSN dash ( low false positive only match ###-##-#### not any 8digi number ) $ find . -iname "*.???x" -type f -exec unzip -p '{}' '*' \; | sed -e 's/]\{1,\}>/ /g; s/[^[:print:]]\{1,\}/ /g' | egrep "\b4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?\b|\b5[1-5][0-9]{14}\b|\b6011[0-9]{14}\b|\b3(?:0[0-5]\b|\b[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}\b|\b3[47][0-9]{13}\b|\b[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}\b" $ rmccurdyDOTcom

Realtime lines per second in a log file, with history

This is similar to standard `pv`, but it retains the rate history instead of only showing the current rate. This is useful for spotting changes. To do this, -f is used to force pv to output, and stderr is redirected to stdout so that `tr` can swap the carriage returns for new lines. (doesn't work correctly is in zsh for some reason. Tail's output isn't redirected to /dev/null like it is in bash. anyone know why? ???????)

pattern match in awk - no grep

Rather than chain a string of greps together and pipe them to awk, use awk to do all the work. In the above example, a string would be output to stdout if it matched pattern1 AND pattern2, but NOT pattern3.

Write comments to your history.

A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection

Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

find which lines in a file are longer than N characters

Filter out lines of input that contain 72, or fewer, characters. This uses bash only. ${#i} is the number of characters in variable i.

Get all files of particular type (say, PDF) listed on some wegpage (say, example.com)

This example command fetches 'example.com' webpage and then fetches+saves all PDF files listed (linked to) on that webpage. [*Note: of course there are no PDFs on example.com. This is just an example]

List your largest installed packages.

Calculates the size on disk for each package installed on the filesystem (or removed but not purged). This is missing the $ | sort -rn which would put the biggest packges on top. That was purposely left out as the command is slightly on the slow side Also you may need to run this as root as some files can only be checked by du if you can read them ;)

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