Commands using ls

Simple but useful; list files in the current directory in mtime order. Useful if you've been working on something and then take a day or two off.

Add this to your .bashrc file.

Then whenever you need to remove all files/directories but one from present working directory. Run:

Notes:

1. This doesn't affect the hidden files.

2. Argument is actually as string. And all files/directories having this string in there name are left untouched.

This is an updated version that some one provided me via another "find" command to find files over a certain size. Keep in mind you may have to mess around with the print values depending on your system to get the correct output you want. This was tested on FC and Cent based servers. (thanks to berta for the update)

newly downloaded videos

random

This command assumes you've already downloaded some YouTube .mp4 or .flv video files via other means. Requires 'shuf', or your own stdin shuffler.

Change open-command and type to suit your needs. One example would be to open the last .jpg file with Eye Of Gnome:

eog $(ls -rt *.jpg | tail -n 1)

The wherepath function will search all the directories in your PATH and print a unique list of locations in the order they are first found in the PATH. (PATH often has redundant entries.) It will automatically use your 'ls' alias if you have one or you can hardcode your favorite 'ls' options in the function to get a long listing or color output for example.

Alternatives:

'whereis' only searches certain fixed locations.

'which -a' searches all the directories in your path but prints duplicates.

'locate' is great but isn't installed everywhere (and it's often too verbose).

This is a slight variation of an existing submission, but uses regular expression to look for files instead. This makes it vastly more versatile, and one can easily verify the files to be kept by running ls | egrep "[REGULAR EXPRESSION]"

Compresses each file individually, creating a $fileneame.tar.gz and removes the uncompressed version, usefull if you have lots of files and don't want 1 huge archive containing them all. you could replace ls with ls *.pdf to just perform the action on pdfs for example.

specially usefull for sql scripts with insert / update statements, to add a commit command after n statements executed.

When your wtmp files are being logrotated, here's an easy way to unpack them all on the fly to see more than a week in the past. The rm is the primitive way to prevent symlink prediction attack.

You WILL have problems if the files have the same name.

Use cases: consolidate music library and unify photos (especially if your camera separates images by dates).

After running the command and verifying if there was no name issues, you can use

to remove now empty subdirectories.

no need for rpm, no need for piping to another command. also no real fu but lacking in unnecessary complexity and distro specific commands.

displays the output of ls -l without the rest of the crud. pretty simple but useful.