Commands tagged ls

For this example, all files in the current directory that end in '.xml.skippy' will have the '.skippy' removed from their names.

This is useful for paging through long directories, mulitple directories, etc. I put this in my ~/.bash_aliases file and alias 'lsl' to it.

trying to copy all your dotfiles from one location to another, this may help

Using column to format a directory listing

yes 6 (tail from 6th line)

I have a directory containing log files. This command delete all but the 5 latest logs. Here is how it works:

* The ls -t command list all files with the latest ones at the top

* The awk's expression means: for those lines greater than 5, delete.

This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit.

This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.

205413

real 0m0.497s

user 0m0.220s

sys 0m0.268s

205413

real 0m3.776s

user 0m3.340s

sys 0m0.424s

*********

** EDIT: turns out this perl liner is mostly masturbation. this is slightly faster:

sh-3.2$ time { find . -maxdepth 1|wc -l; }

205414

real 0m0.456s

user 0m0.116s

sys 0m0.328s

** EDIT: now a slightly faster perl version

sh-3.2$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"'

205414

real 0m0.415s

user 0m0.176s

sys 0m0.232s

Sometimes it is handy to be able to list contents of a tar file within a compressed archive, such as 7Zip in this instance, without having to extract the archive first. This is especially helpful when dealing with larger sized files.

order the files by modification (thanks stanishjohnd) time, one file per output line and filter first 10

search the newest *.jpg in the directory an make a copy to newest.jpg. Just change the extension to search other files. This is usefull eg. if your webcam saves all pictures in a folder and you like the put the last one on your homepage. This works even in a directory with 10000 pictures.

I use terminal with black background on the Mac. Unfortunately, the default ls color for the directory is blue, which is very hard to see. By including the line above in my ~/.bash_profile file, I changed the directory's color to cyan, which is easer to see. For more information on the syntax of the LSCOLORS shell variable:

I tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard

Ok so it's rellay useless line and I sorry for that, furthermore that's nothing optimized at all...

At the beginning I didn't managed by using netstat -p to print out which process was handling that open port 4444, I realize at the end I was not root and security restrictions applied ;p

It's nevertheless a (good ?) way to see how ps(tree) works, as it acts exactly the same way by reading in /proc

So for a specific port, this line returns the calling command line of every thread that handle the associated socket

Sometimes "ls" is just too slow, especially if you're having problems with terminal scroll speed, or if you're a speed freak. In these situations, do an echo * in the current directory to immediately see the directory listing. Do an echo * | tr ' ' '\n' if you want a column. Do an alias ls='echo *' if you want to achieve higher echelons of speed and wonder. Note that echo * is also useful on systems that are so low in memory that "ls" itself is failing - perhaps due to a memory leak that you're trying to debug.

This is a simple command, but extremely useful. It's a quick way to search the file names in the current directory for a substring. Normally people use "ls *term*" but that requires the stars and is not case insensitive. Color (for both ls and grep) is an added bonus.

Shows all linked file and destinations. The 'ls -l' command lists the files in long (1 file per line) format, and the grep command displays only those lines that starts with an l (lower case L) -- a linked file.

Updated: Remove reference to hard links because this command does not apply to hard link as others kindly pointed out.

If you put this in your .bashrc, you might also want to add this to make it use the colors by default: