Commands using find

-exec works better and faster then using a pipe

Simple command to convert a large number of images into jpeg-format. Will delete originals after conversion.

xargs -P N spawns up to N worker processes. -n 40 means each grep command gets up to 40 file names each on the command line.

I used this because I needed to sort the content of a bunch of gzipped log files. Replace sort with something else, or simply remove sort to just rezip everything

this will show the names of the deleted directories, and will delete directories that only no files, only empty directories.

A quick way to find and delete empty dirs, it starts in the current working directory.

If you do find . -empty -type d you will see what could be removed, or to a test run.

Calculates md5 sum of files. sort (required for uniq to work). uniq based on only the hash. use cut ro remove the hash from the result.

Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type.

A simple "ls" lists files *and* directories. So we need to "find" the files (type 'f') only.

As "find" is recursive by default we must restrict it to the current directory by adding a maximum depth of "1".

If you should be using the "zsh" then you can use the dot (.) as a globbing qualifier to denote plain files:

zsh> ls *(.) | wc -l

for more info see the zsh's manual on expansion and substitution - "man zshexpn".

use find to grep all .c files from the target directory, cat them into one stream, then piped to wc to count the lines

Find Word docs by filename in the current directory, convert each of them to plain text using antiword (taking care of spaces in filenames), then grep for a search term in the particular file.

(Of course, it's better to save your data as plain text to make for easier grepping, but that's not always possible.)

Requires antiword. Or you can modify it to use catdoc instead.

This is better than doing a "for `find ...`; do ...; done", if any of the returned filenames have a space in them, it gets mangled. This should be able to handle any files.

Of course, this only works if you have rename installed on your system, so it's not a very portable command.

Good for fixing web permissions. You might also want to do something like this and skip files or directories that begin with a period:

...or include a special case for scripts:

This should work anywhere perl and grep is available. :P

This command will generate "CHECK TABLE `db_name.table_name` ;" statements for all tables present in databases on a MySQL server, which can be piped into the mysql command. (Can also be altered to perform OPTIMIZE and REPAIR functions.)

Tested on MySQL 4.x and 5.x systems in a Linux environment under bash.

Just a handy way to get all the unique links from inside all the html files inside a directory. Can be handy on scripts etc.

By putting the "-not \( -name .svn -prune \)" in the very front of the "find" command, you eliminate the .svn directories in your find command itself. No need to grep them out.

You can even create an alias for this command:

Now you can do things like

You could start this one with

BUT using the find with "-type f" ensures you only get files not any dirs you might have

It'll also create backups of the files it's overwriting

Of course, this assumes that you don't have any files with duplicated filenames in your target structure