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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

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.

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

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using find

Commands using find from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using find - 920 results
ls -il; find * \( -type d -prune \) -o -inum <NUM> -exec rm -i {} \;
2012-08-04 00:22:33
User: yingw
Functions: find ls rm
0
Up
Down
Remove / delete file with ? or special characters in filename

Code to delete file with gremlins/special characters/unicode in file name.

Use ls -i to find the INODE number corresponding to the file and then delete it using that find statement.

detailed here:

http://www.arsc.edu/arsc/support/howtos/nonprintingchars/

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -exec ls -l --full-time {} + | sort -k 6,7
2012-08-03 22:22:51
User: quadcore
Functions: find ls sort
Tags: sort find ls
1
Up
Down
Sort files in multiple directories by date

This sorts files in multiple directories by their modification date. Note that sorting is done at the end using "sort", instead of using the "-ltr" options to "ls". This ensures correct results when sorting a large number of files, in which case "find" will call "ls" multiple times.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for folder in $( find $( pwd ) -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v .svn ); do svn propset svn:ignore -F ignorelist ${folder}; done
2012-08-03 13:50:45
User: Highwayman
Functions: find grep pwd
Tags: bash
0
Up
Down
Recursively set the files to ignore in all folders for svn

To use this comment you'll have to create a file entitled 'ignorelist' where you put the file name or pattern of the files you want to ignore. I used it for my maven project which generates the child project files in each folder so I can import them into eclipse. By adding these project files to the ignore list ensure they won't appear each time I run 'svn status'.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -exec du -sh {} + | sort -hr | head
2012-08-03 04:24:36
User: mrfixit42
Functions: du find sort
Tags: sort find file size
0
Up
Down
Find biggest 10 files in current and subdirectories and sort by file size

"-exec" ftw.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /backup/directory -name "FILENAME_*" -mtime +15 -exec rm -vf {} +
2012-08-03 04:20:53
User: mrfixit42
Functions: find rm
Tags: find unix remove zsh
0
Up
Down
Verbosely delete files matching specific name pattern, older than 15 days.

Like the above, but runs a single rm command

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find path -name '*' -type f | pax -wd > txtarchive.tar
2012-07-29 00:44:51
User: bugmenot
Functions: find pax
0
Up
Down
Create a tar archive with pax containing a set of files

NOTE that pax goes always recursively, for that reason -d option should be added when you don't want to go recursively into directories.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find path -name '*' -type f | cpio -ov -H ustar -F txtarchive.tar
2012-07-29 00:44:12
User: bugmenot
Functions: cpio find
0
Up
Down
Create a tar archive with cpio containing a set of files
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find path -name '*' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -n pattern1 | grep pattern2
2012-07-29 00:40:06
User: bugmenot
Functions: find grep xargs
1
Up
Down
Find inside files two different patterns in the same line and for matched files show number of matched lines

The option -print0 for find and -0 for grep help prevent issue with weird characters or spaces in filenames. Furthermore with xargs there is no limited number of arguments that find can throw.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ./ -type f -name "*.txt" -exec tar uvf myarchives.tar {} +
2012-07-29 00:35:58
User: bugmenot
Functions: find tar
4
Up
Down
Create a tar archive with all files of a certain type found in present dir and subdirs

Note: the tar archive must not exist in order to create it. If exists it will only be updated and no already existent files in present search will still remain in the tar archive. The update option has to be used instead of create because the command tar may be executed more than once depending on the number of arguments that find throws. You can see maximum number of arguments with 'getconf ARG_MAX'

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -exec ls -shS {} + | head -10
2012-07-28 17:21:46
User: erichamion
Functions: find head ls
Tags: sort find GNU find file size
0
Up
Down
Find biggest 10 files in current and subdirectories and sort by file size

This requires a version of GNU find that supports the -exec {} + action, but it seems more straightforward than the versions already posted.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /was61 -type l
2012-07-18 18:20:13
User: djenal
Functions: find
Tags: readlink
0
Up
Down
List all symbolic links in current directory
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /was61 -type l
2012-07-18 18:20:11
User: djenal
Functions: find
Tags: readlink
0
Up
Down
List all symbolic links in current directory
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /was61 -type l
2012-07-18 18:19:37
User: djenal
Functions: find
Tags: readlink
0
Up
Down
List all symbolic links in current directory
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f \( -name '*.c' -o -name '*.cpp' -o -name '*.cc' -o -name '*.cxx' \) | xargs grep "#include.*\.c.*" 2>&1 | tee source_inside_source_list.txt
2012-07-17 09:41:18
User: rajendra_s_y
Functions: find grep tee xargs
Tags: find
0
Up
Down
List down source files which include another source file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name "*.php" -print | xargs sed -i 's/foo/bar/g'
2012-07-15 21:55:35
User: bisio
Functions: find sed xargs
0
Up
Down
search and replace in multiple files
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo find / \( -nouser -o -nogroup \)
2012-07-13 07:09:08
User: gwd
Functions: find sudo
Tags: find permissions
1
Up
Down
list any Linux files without users or groups

suspicious/anomalous ownership may indicate system breach; should return no results

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo find / -perm -2 ! -type l -ls
2012-07-13 07:01:42
User: gwd
Functions: find sudo
Tags: find permissions
0
Up
Down
list all world-writeable Linux files
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du -h | sort -hr | head -10
2012-06-30 10:03:31
User: netaxiz
Functions: du find head sort xargs
Tags: sort find file size
8
Up
Down
Find biggest 10 files in current and subdirectories and sort by file size
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du -h | sort -hr | head
2012-06-29 12:43:06
User: mesuutt
Functions: du find sort xargs
Tags: sort find file size
2
Up
Down
Find biggest 10 files in current and subdirectories and sort by file size
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name "fullcalib4.csv" -exec tail -n1 \{\} \; >>all.csv
2012-06-27 16:12:47
User: kaplan2539
Functions: find tail
0
Up
Down
collect fullcalib data
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -exec stat -f '%m %N' {} \; | sort -n
2012-06-20 00:13:52
User: cellularmitosis
Functions: find sort stat
Tags: sort find xargs stat
0
Up
Down
Find files and list them sorted by modification time

here's a version which works on OS X.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l "foo"
2012-06-19 16:27:30
User: apotheos
Functions: find grep xargs
Tags: find xargs grep find text recursive
0
Up
Down
List files containing given search string recursively
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . \( -name "*cpp" -o -name "*hpp" \) -exec grep -Hn -E "043[eE]|70[Dd]7" \{\} \;
2012-06-15 12:55:23
User: kaplan2539
Functions: find grep
0
Up
Down
search in all cpp / hpp files using egrep
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /SOME/PATH -type f -execdir rm -f {} \+
2012-06-15 05:32:31
User: kiiwii
Functions: find rm
Tags: find rm
0
Up
Down
remove a directory filled with too many files

rm /SOME/PATH/*, when you hit "argument list too long".

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ./ -type f -exec sh -c 'echo "{}" "$(dirname "{}")/$(basename "{}" | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]")"' \;
2012-06-14 07:13:42
User: jelloir
Functions: find sh
Tags: bash find mv rename tr
0
Up
Down
recursively change file name from uppercase to lowercase (or viceversa)

Handles spaces in file names and directories. Optionally change directories as well by pipe to tr from dirname.

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