Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands tagged find from sorted by
Terminal - Commands tagged find - 350 results
ls -trF | grep -v \/ | tail -n 1
2011-09-14 20:05:37
User: mrpollo
Functions: grep ls tail
Tags: find stat mtime
-1
Up
Down
Hunt for the newest file.

Sort by time and Reverse to get Ascending order, then display a marker next to the a file, negate directory and select only 1 result

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo find / -type f | perl -MFile::Basename -ne '$counts{dirname($_)}++; END { foreach $d (sort keys %counts) {printf("%d\t%s\n",$counts{$d},$d);} }'|sort -rn | tee /tmp/sortedfilecount.out | head
2011-09-14 19:41:19
User: tamouse
Functions: find perl sort sudo tee
Tags: tee sort perl find HEAD
0
Up
Down
Find directories with lots of files in them

Find which directories on your system contain a lot of files.

Edit: much shorter and betterer with -n switch.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
fn=$(find . -type f -printf "%T@\t%p\n"|sort -n|tail -1|cut -f2); echo $(date -r "$fn") "$fn"
2011-09-13 14:26:20
User: tzot
Functions: cut date echo find sort tail
Tags: find stat mtime
0
Up
Down
Hunt for the newest file.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -printf "%T@ %p\n" | sed -e 1d | while read ts fn; do ts=${ts%.*}; if [ $ts -ge ${gts:-0} ]; then gts=$ts; echo `date -d @$gts` $fn; fi; done
2011-09-13 08:00:27
User: bandie91
Functions: echo find read sed
Tags: find stat mtime
-1
Up
Down
Hunt for the newest file.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -l /etc/**/*killall
2011-08-30 05:57:49
User: xeor
Functions: ls
Tags: bash find globbing
9
Up
Down
find builtin in bash v4+

This command will give you the same list of files as "find /etc/ -name '*killall' | xargs ls -l".

In a simpler format just do 'ls /etc/**/file'.

It uses shell globbing, so it will also work with other commands, like "cp /etc/**/sshd sshd_backup".

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -iname '*.conf' | xargs grep "searh string" -sl
2011-08-26 14:58:51
User: mesuutt
Functions: find grep xargs
Tags: find grep
0
Up
Down
Search recursively to find a word in certain file types

-sl : show just file names

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /var/spool/mqueue -type f -mtime +7 | perl -lne unlink
2011-08-19 15:22:02
User: mengesb
Functions: find perl
Tags: bash Linux perl find
0
Up
Down
Find all e-mails older than 7 days in the queue and delete them

Find all files in /var/spool/mqueue older than 7 days, pass to perl to efficiently delete them (faster than xargs or -exec when you've got millions or hundreds of thousands to delete). Naturally the type, directory, and file age vars can be adjusted to meet your specific needs.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
allVideos() { find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file -iNf - | grep ": video/" | cut -d: -f1; }
2011-08-19 11:58:59
User: totti
Functions: cut file find grep xargs
Tags: video find grep mime
0
Up
Down
Find all videos under current directory using MIME a.k.a not using extension

Videos are found using their MIME type. Thus no need to for an extension for the video file.

This is a efficent version of "jnash" cmd (4086). Thanks for jnash. This cmd will only show video files while his cmd show files having "video" anywhere in path.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f | sed -n 's/..*\.//p' | sort -f | uniq -ic
2011-08-19 00:19:43
User: tyler_l
Functions: find sed sort uniq
Tags: bash find count extension
0
Up
Down
Count files by extension

Change "sort -f" to "sort" and "uniq -ic" to "uniq -c" to make it case sensitive.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lsr() { find "${@:-.}" -print0 |sort -z |xargs -0 ls $LS_OPTIONS -dla; }
2011-08-15 03:10:58
User: h3xx
Functions: find ls sort xargs
Tags: sort find ls xargs function list
2
Up
Down
Sorted, recursive long file listing

Tells you everything you could ever want to know about all files and subdirectories. Great for package creators. Totally secure too.

On my Slackware box, this gets set upon login:

LS_OPTIONS='-F -b -T 0 --color=auto'

and

alias ls='/bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS'

which works great.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort
2011-08-14 23:34:10
User: sammcj
Functions: find
Tags: sort find recently changed
16
Up
Down
Find the most recently changed files (recursively)
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type d -name 'CVS' -exec rm -r {} \;
2011-08-12 12:15:44
User: Enirevlow
Functions: find rm
Tags: find
0
Up
Down
remove all CVS directories
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type d -name 'CVS' | xargs rm -r
2011-08-10 07:38:51
User: kev
Functions: find rm xargs
Tags: find
-5
Up
Down
remove all CVS directories
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find * -type d -maxdepth 0
2011-08-07 06:04:50
User: edogawaconan
Functions: find
Tags: find ls grep sh
1
Up
Down
List only directories, one per line

Alternatively,

ls -F | grep /\$

but will break on directories containing newlines. Or the safe, POSIX sh way (but will miss dotfiles):

for i in *; do test -d "./$i" && printf "%s\n" "$i"; done
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -iname "*.flac" | cpio -pdm /Volumes/Music/FLAC
2011-08-02 08:25:21
User: sammcj
Functions: cpio find
Tags: find copy cpio recursive recursive directory find copy
7
Up
Down
Find all files of a type and copy them elsewhere while keeping intact their full directory structure using find and cpio

.flac is the filetype.

/Volumes/Music/FLAC is the destination.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -exec chmod -x {} \;
2011-07-25 10:49:26
User: homoludens
Functions: chmod find
Tags: find chmod
2
Up
Down
remove execute bit only from files. recursively
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -name "*.py" -exec wc -l {} \; | awk '{ SUM += $1} END {print SUM }'
2011-07-08 13:38:11
User: dheerosaur
Functions: awk find wc
Tags: awk find loc
0
Up
Down
Find lines of code (LOC) of a filetype in a project.

Replace .py with .rb or .java to get the LOC of that particular filetype. An alternative is http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2812/make-a-statistic-about-the-lines-of-code

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /myfs -size +209715200c -exec du -m {} \; |sort -nr |head -10
2011-07-07 21:12:46
User: arlequin
Functions: du find head sort
Tags: Linux size find unix ksh aix korn shell
2
Up
Down
List top 10 files in filesystem or mount point bigger than 200MB

Specify the size in bytes using the 'c' option for the -size flag. The + sign reads as "bigger than". Then execute du on the list; sort in reverse mode and show the first 10 occurrences.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find -type f -printf "%S\t%p\n" 2>/dev/null | gawk '{if ($1 < 1.0) print $1 $2}'
2011-07-02 19:22:49
User: thetrivialstuff
Functions: find gawk
Tags: find sparse files sparse
1
Up
Down
find sparse files

Prints the path/filename and sparseness of any sparse files (files that use less actual space than their total size because the filesystem treats large blocks of 00 bytes efficiently).

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name '*.java' -o -name '*.xml' | grep -v '\.svn' | xargs wc -l
2011-06-30 12:45:40
User: ewilson
Functions: find grep wc xargs
Tags: find grep wc
-1
Up
Down
Count the lines of source code in directory, ignoring files in generated by svn

There's nothing particularly novel about this combination of find, grep, and wc, I'm just putting it here in case I want it again.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ack "search pharse" *.[ch]
2011-06-29 15:13:20
User: jalanb
Tags: find grep ack
2
Up
Down
Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code

ack search recursively by default

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -printf %s\\n | numsum
2011-06-27 12:39:16
User: Strawp
Functions: find
Tags: find numsum
-2
Up
Down
Sum file sizes

pipe into

| sed "s/$/\/(1024\*1024\*1024)/" | bc

to get size in GB

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -newermt "2010-01-01" ! -newermt "2010-06-01"
2011-06-26 09:52:26
User: flatcap
Functions: find
Tags: find dates
29
Up
Down
find files in a date range

Find files in a specific date range - in this case, the first half of last year.

-newermt = modification time of the file is more recent than this date

GNU find allows any date specfication that GNU date would accept, e.g.

find . -type f -newermt "3 years ago" ! -newermt "2 years ago"

or

find . -type f -newermt "last monday"
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
touch -t 201001010000 begin; touch -t 201012312359.59 end; find . -newer begin -a ! -newer end
2011-06-22 20:09:05
User: unixmonkey22900
Functions: find touch
Tags: find dates touch
1
Up
Down
find files in a date range

Example above will recursively find files in current directory created/modified in 2010.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name "*.[ch]" -print | xargs grep -i -H "search phrase"
2011-06-05 23:27:30
User: jblaine
Functions: find grep xargs
Tags: find grep
-3
Up
Down
Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code

Original submitter's command spawns a "grep" process for every file found. Mine spawns one grep with a long list of all matching files to search in. Learn xargs, everyone! It's a very powerful and always available tool.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate