Commands using find

Using xargs is usually much quicker as it does not have to execute chmod for every file

Watch out if you have several USB drives plugged in: it scans the whole /media/ folder !!! You can replace /media/ by the path of a specific USB drive (something like /media/F77A-530B/)

I use a sound recorder and I want to plug the recorder and grab the most recent sound.

That's what this command does.

Use mv instead of cp to move instead of copy.

Change *.wav to the required file type.

Sometimes you want to see all of the systcls for a given $thing. I happened to need to easily look at all of the vm sysctls between two boxes and compare them. This is what I came up with.

This will check if there are any empty directories, or newly emptied directories, in a list of directories. It will then delete all of those directories. It works with gnu find and OSX/BSD find.

Ever done a find to get content and been messed up by .git, .svn, .hg or the like spamming your results? Did you really want to grep over every copy of the file that existed in your git history?

Replace:

with:

or if you really have too many files to put in one argv:

This simple command removes all the .svn directories recursively. Useful when you want to get a clean code excluding .svn files.

Check what is getting delete through this command

" find . -name '.svn' -type d | xargs echo "

This doesn't require any non-standard programs.

This is much safer than using -L, because it will not follow links that point to places outside the target directory subtree (CWD, in this case). See here for explanation: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/38691/9382

for those without the tree command.

This command won't delete resource forks from an HFS file system, only from file systems that don't natively support resource forks.

When downloading files on a Mac, Apple adds the x-attribute: com.apple.quarantine. Often, this makes it so you can't even run a ./configure. This command gets rid of the quarantine for all files in the current directory.

This will make a backup of all hidden files and folders in the home folder.

Using a for loop, rename all files with .MP3 extension to .mp3.

Find files matching multiple descriptions (*.c and *.cpp) excluding multiple directories (unit-test and android).

Very useful for finding all the source code that should be compiled.

Provides a much cleaner, easier to read output than the closest alternative, ls -1R. This alternative makes it easier to differentiate directories from files: find . -printf '%y %p\n' | perl -ne 'if( m/(\w) (.*)\/(.*)/ ) { $t = $1; $p = $2; $f = $3; $t =~ s/[^d]/ /; $p =~ s/[^\/]/ /g; $p =~ s/\//|/g; print "$t $p/$f\n"; } elsif( m/(\w) (.*)/ ) { print "$1 $2\n"; } else { print "error interpreting: \"$_\"\n"; }'

be careful where you execute this from

do a 'sudo ls' beforehand to prime sudo to not ask for your password