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

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:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)
» commands using find

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

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using find

Terminal - Commands using find - 920 results

find /home/fizz -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort

2009-05-20 10:45:39

User: fizz

Functions: find

Tags: Filesystem sort find modification time

Up
Down

List files recursively sorted by modified time

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

count() { find $@ -type f -exec cat {} + | wc -l; }

2009-05-19 15:02:51

User: Keruspe

Functions: cat find wc

Tags: find count

Up
Down

Function that counts recursively number of lines of all files in specified folders

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find . -type d -exec rmdir {} \;

2009-05-19 08:59:15

User: sharfah

Functions: find rmdir

Tags: find rm

Up
Down

Delete Empty Directories

Deletes empty directories and prints an error if directory is not empty.

find . -name \*.mp3 -printf "%C+ %h/%f\n" | sort -r | head -n20 | awk '{print "\""$2"\""}' | xargs -I {} cp {} ~/tmp

2009-05-17 07:06:10

User: bkinsey

Functions: awk cp find head sort xargs

Up
Down

copies 20 most recently downloaded mp3 files (such as from Miro) into a directory

Change ~/tmp to the destination directory, such as your mounted media. Change -n20 to whatever number of files to copy. It should quit when media is full. I use this to put my most recently downloaded podcasts onto my phone.

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

find . -name '*.m4a' | xargs -I audiofile mplayer -ao pcm "audiofile" -ao pcm:file="audiofile.wav"

2009-05-16 11:51:14

User: angleto

Functions: find xargs

Tags: audio mplayer

Up
Down

covert m4a audio files to wav

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

find /var -mount -ls -xdev | /usr/bin/sort -nr +6 | more

2009-05-16 10:53:55

User: mnikhil

Functions: find

Tags: sort find du more var

Up
Down

find largest file in /var

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find . -name "\.svn" -exec rm -rf {} ";"

2009-05-14 12:02:25

User: caiosba

Functions: find rm

Tags: svn find remove

-1

Up
Down

Remove all .svn folders inside a folder

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find / $ -name "*.log" -o -name "*.mylogs" $ -exec ls -lrt {} \; | sort -k6,8 | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f8- | tr -d '\n' | xargs -0 rm

2009-05-10 10:45:48

User: ghazz

Functions: cut find head ls sort tr xargs

Up
Down

Find and delete oldest file of specific types in directory tree

This works on my ubuntu/debian machines.

I suspect other distros need some tweaking of sort and cut.

I am sure someone could provide a shorter/faster version.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find ~user/ -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;

2009-05-09 12:55:47

User: servermanaged

Functions: find rm

Up
Down

Remove all backup files in my home directory

I use this simple command for remove all backup files generated usually by editors like Vim and Emacs.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find /var/www/html/ -type f -mtime +30 -exec basename {} \;

2009-05-07 21:05:47

User: lv4tech

Functions: basename find

Up
Down

Search for files older than 30 days in a directory and list only their names not the full path

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

for i in *jpg; do jpeginfo -c $i | grep -E "WARNING|ERROR" | cut -d " " -f 1 | xargs -I '{}' find /mnt/sourcerep -name {} -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I '{}' cp -f {} ./ ; done

2009-05-07 00:30:36

User: vincentp

Functions: cp cut find grep xargs

Tags: Image processing image copy jpeg jpg corrupt sync

Up
Down

sync a directory of corrupted jpeg with a source directory

Find all corrupted jpeg in the current directory, find a file with the same name in a source directory hierarchy and copy it over the corrupted jpeg file.

Convenient to run on a large bunch of jpeg files copied from an unsure medium.

Needs the jpeginfo tool, found in the jpeginfo package (on debian at least).

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

find . -name "*.[ch]" -exec grep -i -H "search pharse" {} \;

2009-05-06 15:22:49

User: bunedoggle

Functions: find grep

Tags: find grep

Up
Down

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

cd $(dirname $(find ~ -name emails.txt))

2009-05-01 21:26:58

User: haivu

Functions: cd dirname find

Tags: bash dirname

Up
Down

Search for a single file and go to it

This command looks for a single file named emails.txt which is located somewhere in my home directory and cd to that directory. This command is especially helpful when the file is burried deep in the directory structure. I tested it against the bash shells in Xubuntu 8.10 and Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find . -path ./mnt -prune -o -path ./lost+found -prune -o -path ./sys -prune -o -path ./proc -prune -o -print | cpio -pumd /destination && mkdir /destination/mnt/ && mkdir /destination/proc && mkdir /destination/sys

2009-04-28 22:14:45

User: nutria

Functions: cpio find mkdir

Tags: find cpio

Up
Down

Clone /

Clone linux installation.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find . | cpio -pumdv /destination

2009-04-28 22:08:30

User: nutria

Functions: cpio find

Tags: find cpio

Up
Down

Clone current directory into /destination verbosely

Copy every file from current directory to destination preserving modification time.

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find ./ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

2009-04-22 21:14:36

User: ethanmiller

Functions: chmod find

Tags: chmod

Up
Down

Recursively change permissions on files, leave directories alone.

Comments (9) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.sh' -o -name '*.txt'

2009-04-20 17:29:13

User: P17

Functions: find

-6

Up
Down

Find different filetypes in current directory

find -type f -printf '%P\000' | egrep -iz '\.(avi|mpg|mov|flv|wmv|asf|mpeg|m4v|divx|mp4|mkv)$' | sort -z | xargs -0 ls -1

2009-04-19 19:45:11

User: udim

Functions: egrep find ls sort xargs

Tags: GNU/Linux

-1

Up
Down

Show all video files in the current directory (and sub-dirs)

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find /usr/ -type l ! -xtype f ! -xtype d -ok rm -f {} \;

2009-04-17 04:47:21

User: moz667

Functions: find rm

Up
Down

Eliminate dead symlinks interactively in /usr/ recursevely

Its not mine... I get from textlive migration in gentoo : http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/tex/texlive-migration-guide.xml

find /path/to/my/files/ -type f -name "*txt*" | xargs du -k | awk 'BEGIN{x=0}{x=x+$1}END{print x}'

2009-04-16 14:17:04

User: unixmonkey3280

Functions: awk du find xargs

Up
Down

Summarise the size of all files matching a simple regex

Use the find command to match certain files and summarise their total size in KBytes.

find | sed -e "s/^.*\///" | awk ' BEGIN { FS=""} { print NF " " $0 } ' | sort -nrf | head -10

2009-04-13 21:03:07

User: nitehawk

Functions: awk find head sed sort

Up
Down

get the top 10 longest filenames

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

find -writable

2009-04-11 22:16:35

User: kFiddle

Functions: find

Tags: find permissions

Up
Down

Find writable files

Have a grudge against someone on your network? Do a "find -writable" in their directory and see what you can vandalize! But seriously, this is really useful to check the files in your own home directory to make sure they can't inadvertently be changed by someone else's wayward script.

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

find ~ -mtime +365 -exec mv {} /tmp/mybackup \;

2009-04-11 12:16:48

User: kayowas

Functions: find mv

-5

Up
Down

exec option in find

This example uses the -exec option to move all matching files into a backup directory

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

for i in $( find . ); do echo zipping file: $i zip $i.zip $i done

2009-04-07 20:37:49

User: archlich

Functions: echo find

-4

Up
Down

zip all files in a directory, one file per zip

Note that this will not work with files with spaces or characters that need to be escaped. Feel free to leave any comments to improve upon this command, and I'll add it in.

Thanks!

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

2009-04-06 21:36:04

User: oernii

Functions: file find mv

-3

Up
Down

convert all WAVs from any format (MS ADPCM) to PCM

I needed this for wine.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

‹ First < 29 30 31 32 33 > Last ›