Commands by jonasrullo (1)

  • Faster find and move using the find and xargs commands. Almost as fast as locate.

    Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type. Show Sample Output


    4
    find . -maxdepth 2 -name "*somepattern" -print0 | xargs -0 -I "{}" echo mv "{}" /destination/path
    jonasrullo · 2009-08-01 01:55:47 7

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands

Check These Out

Get a BOFH excuse
Gets a BOFH excuse from the BOFH excuse server (towel.blinkenlights.nl port 666), and passes it through sed and tr to get rid of telnet connection stuff.

Recursively lists all files in the current directory, except the ones in '.snapshot' directory
This can be useful for those who have mounted NetApp file-systems with snapshot activated.

Python version 3: Serve current directory tree at http://$HOSTNAME:8000/
In Python version 3, the module was merged into http.server. Gentlemen, change your aliases.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Set access and modification timestamps of a file using another one as reference
atime and mtime timestamps of $FILE2 is changed according to the ones of $FILE1. If $FILE2 doesn't exist is created.

Create .pdf from .doc
sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Retrieve the size of a file on a server
Downloads the entire file, but http servers don't always provide the optional 'Content-Length:' header, and ftp/gopher/dict/etc servers don't provide a filesize header at all.

Catch a proccess from a user and strace it.
It sits there in a loop waiting for a proccess from that user to spawn. When it does it will attach strace to it

Mac Sleep Timer
Schedule your Mac to sleep at any future time. Also wake, poweron, shutdown, wakeorpoweron. Or repeating with $ sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 7:00:00 Query with $ pmset -g sched Lots more at http://www.macenterprise.org/articles/powermanagementandschedulingviathecommandline

Mutt - Change mail sender.

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: