Commands using file sorted by votes

Commands using file (166)

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Cat files in a directory; for loop command

Original submitted version would break if any filenames had whitespaces in them. The command is a Bad Idea anyhow, because you will end up `cat`ing a binary or something else specacularly bad.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for file in ./*; do cat "$file"; sleep 0.3

DopeGhoti · 2011-11-28 20:10:57 3
Write in a text file the contents of all the zip files in a directory.

It can be used to create an index of a backup directory or to find some file.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for file in *.zip; do unzip -l "$file" >> archiveindex.txt ; done;

chon8a · 2013-05-02 01:43:26 7
Reset the last modified time for each file in a git repo to its last commit time
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for file in $( git ls-files ); do echo $file; touch -t $(git --no-pager log --date=local -1 --format="%ct" $file | php -r 'echo @date( "YmdHi.s", trim( file_get_contents( "php://stdin" ) ) );') $file; done

westonruter · 2015-07-01 00:28:06 13
stores the number of lines of "file" in a variable to use in a loop
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

count=`wc -l file | cut -d ' ' -f1`

vmplacco · 2009-02-25 21:21:47 5
convert all WAVs from any format (MS ADPCM) to PCM

I needed this for wine.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

for file in $(find -type f -iname "*wav"); do mv $file "$file"_orig.WAV; mplayer -ao pcm "$file"_orig.WAV -ao pcm:file=$file; done

oernii · 2009-04-06 21:36:04 6
determine if a shared library is compiled as 32bit or 64bit

file displays a files type the -L flag means follow sym-links (as libraries are often sym-linked to another this behavior is likely preferred) more complex behavior (*two* grep commands!) could be used to determine if the file is or is not a shared library.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

file -L <library> | grep -q '64-bit' && echo 'library is 64 bit' || echo 'library is 32 bit'

infinull · 2010-03-07 06:31:35 3
Recursive and alphabetical orderly cp
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

for file in `find *| sort -n | sed 's% %?%g'`; do echo "${file//?/ }"; cp --parents "${file//?/ }" /destinity_folder/ ;done

juanmi · 2011-05-23 16:34:08 7
Remove blank lines from a file and save output to new file
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

sed '/^$/d' file >newfile

haplo · 2009-09-24 19:22:49 5
download file1 file2 file3 file4 .... file 100

With counter format [001, 002, ..., 999] , nice with pictures or wallpapers collections.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

for file in $(seq -f '%03.f' 1 $TOTAL ); do echo "($file/$TOTAL)"; curl -f -O http://domain.com/Name_$file.ext; done

nordri · 2010-01-12 15:23:44 6
a find and replace within text-based files, for batch text replacement, not using perl
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-5

for file in `find . -iname "FILENAME"`; do cat $file | sed "s/SEARCH_STRING/REPLACE_STRING/" > $file.tmp; mv $file.tmp $file; done

unixmonkey6754 · 2010-02-24 13:46:29 3
Numerate files, rename files in a directory by incremental number

Renames files in a directory to incremental numbers, following alphabetic order. The command does not maintain extensions.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-5

declare -i i; i=0; for file in *; do i=`expr $i+1`; mv "$file" $i; done;

themiurgo · 2010-08-26 12:24:38 5
Numerate files, rename files in a directory by incremental number
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-5

declare -i i=0 ; for file in * ; do i=$[$i+1] ; mv "$file" $i; done

pepin · 2010-08-26 12:40:58 3
list with full path
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-6

for file in *; do echo $PWD/$file; done

Velenux · 2011-12-16 13:12:00 4
remove all dead symbolic links in a directory
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-8

for i in $(file * | grep broken | cut -d : -f 1); do rm $i; done

Znuff · 2010-11-02 16:10:42 10
list with full path

Also lists hidden files, current dir and topdir.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-8

for file in * .*; do echo $PWD/$file; done

marek158 · 2011-12-16 13:42:07 3
Find broken symlinks
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-9

find . -type l | xargs file | grep broken

kineticrick · 2011-04-07 22:58:02 4
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Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code

I have a bash alias for this command line and find it useful for searching C code for error messages. The -H tells grep to print the filename. you can omit the -i to match the case exactly or keep the -i for case-insensitive matching. This find command find all .c and .h files

Get creation date of a file on ext2-3-4 fs

Return the creation date of a file on ext2, 3, 4 filesystems, because stat command won't show it. Useful on ubuntu, debian, and else

List your installed Chromium extensions (with url to each page)

Gives you a list for all installed chrome (chromium) extensions with URL to the page of the extension. With this you can easy add a new Bookmark folder called "extensions" add every URL to that folder, so it will be synced and you can access the names from every computer you are logged in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Only tested with chromium, for chrome you maybe have to change the find $PATH.

Edit a google doc with vim

Google just released a new commend line tool offering all sorts of new services from the commend line. One of them is uploading a youtube video but there are plenty more google services to interact with. Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ Manual: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/wiki/Manual This specific command courtesy of lifehacker:http://lifehacker.com/5568817/ Though all can be found in manual page linked above.

Restore mysql database uncompressing on the fly.

This way you keep the file compressed saving disk space. Other way less optimal using named pipes: mysql -uroot -p'passwd' database <

Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file

Say you're started "xzcat bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program >summary" an hour ago, and you of course forgot to enable progress output (you could've just put "awk 'NR%1000==0{print NR>"/dev/stderr"}{print}'" in the pipeline but it's too late for that now). But you really want some idea of how far along your program is. Then you can run the above command to see how many % along xzcat is in reading the file. Note that this is for the GNU/Linux version of lsof; the one found on e.g. Darwin has slightly different output so the awk part may need some tweaks.

RELINK a lot of broken symlinks - FIX broken symlinks after rsync site to new server

After you run this script, you can check status for broken symlink with this command: find -L . -type l

list block devices

Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Use default value if unassigned

Will use variable value (for variable $my_dir, in this case), an assign a default value if there is none.

Use md5sum to check your music and movie files. Also use diff.

This is a beginning script. You can create a file with > filename. You can also use diff to compare output run at different times to verify no change in your files. I apologize in advance if this is too simple. For some it should be a start.

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Commands using file (166)

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