Commands tagged find

Assuming only VIM has *~ files in your current dir. If you have usefull data in a file named in the *~ pattern, DO NOT RUN this command!

Use find to recursively make a list of all files from the current directory and downwards. The files have to have an extension of the ones listed. Then for every file found, grep it for 'searchString', returns the filename if searchString is found.

Works recusivley in the specified dir or '.' if none given.

Repeatedly calls 'find' to find a newer file, when no newer files exist you have the newest.

In this case 'newest' means most recently modified. To find the most recently created change -newer to -cnewer.

Changed out the for loop for an xargs. It's a tad shorter, and a tad cleaner.

Recursively replace a string in files with lines matching string. Lines with the string "group name" will have the first > character replaced while other > characters on other lines will be ignored.

The difference between this and the other alternatives here using only grep is that find will, by default, not follow a symlink. In some cases, this is definitely desirable.

Using find also allows you to exclude certain files, eg

would allow you to exclude any files .tmp files.

Also note that there's no need for calling grep recursively, as find passes each found file to grep.

Improvement of the command "Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)" when searching for duplicate files in a directory containing a subversion working copy. This way the (multiple dupicates) in the meta-information directories are ignored.

Can easily be adopted for other VCS as well. For CVS i.e. change ".svn" into ".csv":

Recursively rename .JPG to .jpg using standard find and mv. It's generally better to use a standard tool if doing so is not much more difficult.

This command is useful for renaming a clipart, pic gallery or your photo collection. It will only change the big caps to small ones (on the extension).

This command find all files in the current dir and subdirs, and replace all occurances of "oldstring" in every file with "newstring".

Execute this in the root of your music library and this recurses through the directories and normalizes each folder containing mp3s as a batch. This assumes those folders hold an album each. The command "normalize-audio" may go by "normalize" on some systems.

if its the current directory, no need find command. just grep will do

This script will list all the files in the tarballs present on any folder or subfolder of the provided path. The while loop is for echoing the file name of the tarball before listing the files, so the tarball can be identified

Find files recursively that were updated in the last hour ignoring SVN files and folders. Incase you do a full svn up on accident.

change the *.avi to whatever you want to match, you can remove it altogether if you want to check all files.

This pipeline will find, sort and display all files based on mtime. This could be done with find | xargs, but the find | xargs pipeline will not produce correct results if the results of find are greater than xargs command line buffer. If the xargs buffer fills, xargs processes the find results in more than one batch which is not compatible with sorting.

Note the "-print0" on find and "-0" switch for perl. This is the equivalent of using xargs. Don't you love perl?

Note that this pipeline can be easily modified to any data produced by perl's stat operator. eg, you could sort on size, hard links, creation time, etc. Look at stat and just change the '9' to what you want. Changing the '9' to a '7' for example will sort by file size. A '3' sorts by number of links....

Use head and tail at the end of the pipeline to get oldest files or most recent. Use awk or perl -wnla for further processing. Since there is a tab between the two fields, it is very easy to process.