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.

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.

Universal configuration monitoring and system of record for IT.
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

May 19, 2015 - A Look At The New Commandlinefu
I've put together a short writeup on what kind of newness you can expect from the next iteration of clfu. Check it out here.
March 2, 2015 - New Management
I'm Jon, I'll be maintaining and improving clfu. Thanks to David for building such a great resource!
Hide

Top Tags


awk, bash, curl, find, grep, Linux, sed
Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Maintained by Jon H.

Site originally by David Winterbottom (user root).

Psst. Open beta.

Wow, didn't really expect you to read this far down. The latest iteration of the site is in open beta. It's a gentle open beta-- not in prime-time just yet. It's being hosted over at UpGuard (link) and you are more than welcome to give it a shot. Couple things:

  • » The open beta is running a copy of the database that will not carry over to the final version. Don't post anything you don't mind losing.
  • » If you wish to use your user account, you will probably need to reset your password.
Your feedback is appreciated via the form on the beta page. Thanks! -Jon & CLFU Team

Commands tagged find from sorted by
Terminal - Commands tagged find - 367 results
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 (1) | 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
32
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
perl -MFile::Find -e"finddepth(sub{rmdir},'.')"
2011-05-23 08:45:59
User: igorfu
Functions: perl
Tags: find
0
Up
Down
find and delete empty directories recursively
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find -L / -samefile /path/to/file -exec ls -ld {} +
2011-04-27 06:14:15
User: eightmillion
Functions: find ls
Tags: find symlinks links symbolic link
17
Up
Down
Find all the links to a file

This command finds and prints all the symbolic and hard links to a file. Note that the file argument itself be a link and it will find the original file as well.

You can also do this with the inode number for a file or directory by first using stat or ls or some other tool to get the number like so:

stat -Lc %i file

or

ls -Hid file

And then using:

find -L / -inum INODE_NUMBER -exec ls -ld {} +
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -iname '*.jpg' -ls |awk '{TOTAL+=$7} END {print int(TOTAL/(1024^2))"MB"}'
2011-04-26 18:18:37
User: mack
Functions: awk find
Tags: awk find filesize
1
Up
Down
How to estimate the storage size of all files not named *.[extension] on the current directory

With this sentence we can estimate the storage size of all files not named *.jpg on the current directory.

The syntax is based on Linux, for Unix compliance use:

find ./* -prune ! -name '*.jpg' -ls |awk '{TOTAL+=$7} END {print int(TOTAL/(1024^2))"MB"}'

We can change the jpg extension for whatever extension what we need

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime +60 -ls
2011-04-26 01:11:07
User: mack
Functions: find
Tags: find old files
-1
Up
Down
Find files older than 60 days
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -name \*.php | while IFS="" read i; do expand -t4 "$i" > "$i-"; mv "$i-" "$i"; done
2011-04-08 12:53:14
User: flatcap
Functions: expand find mv read
Tags: find read expand spaces unexpand tabs whitespace
-4
Up
Down
Replace spaces with tabs & format file source recursively within a directory

Recursively find php files and replace tab characters with spaces.

Options:

"\*.php" -- replace this with the files you wish to find

"expand" -- replace tabs with spaces (use "unexpand" to replace spaces with tabs)

"-t4" -- tabs represent 4 spaces

Note: The IFS="" in the middle is to prevent 'read' from eating leading/trailing whitespace in filenames.

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type l | xargs file | grep broken
2011-04-07 22:58:02
User: kineticrick
Functions: file find grep xargs
Tags: find xargs symlinks
-9
Up
Down
Find broken symlinks
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -depth -print -execdir rename -f 'y/A-Z/a-z/' '{}' \;
2011-03-25 03:10:27
User: rsimpson
Functions: find rename
Tags: bash find mv rename tr
1
Up
Down
recursively change file name from uppercase to lowercase (or viceversa)

easier way to recursively change files to lowercase using rename instead

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