This command uses the recursive glob and glob qualifiers from zsh. This will remove all the empty directories from the current directory down.

The **/* recurses down through all the files and directories

The glob qualifiers are added into the parenthesis. The / means only directories. The F means 'full' directories, and the ^ reverses that to mean non-full directories. For more info on these qualifiers see the zsh docs: http://zsh.dotsrc.org/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#SEC87

A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file.

It can be easily avoided because of :

1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file"

2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file

but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file.

Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

Inspired by http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2573/remove-all-files-previously-extracted-from-a-tar.gz-file. .... yet for zip files

Remove annoying improperly packaged files that untar into the incorrect directory.

Example, When you untar and it extracts hundreds of files into the current directory.... bleh.

avoid rm to be recursive until you complete the command: put the -rf at the end!

It's also possible to delay the extraction (echo "unrar e ... fi" |at now+20 minutes) wich is really convenient!

Pipe whatever you want to this function, it will, if everything goes well, be redirected to a channel or a user on an IRC server.

Please note that :

- I am not responsible of flood excesses you might provoke.

- that function does not reply to PINGs from the server. That's the reason why I first write in a temporary file. Indeed, I don't want to wait for inputs while being connected to the server. However, according to the configuration of the server and the length of your file, you may timeout before finishing.

- Concerning the server, the variable content must be on the form "irc.server.org 6667" (or any other port). If you want to make some tests, you can also create a fake IRC server on "localhost 55555" by using

- Concerning the target, you can choose a channel (beginning with a '#' like "#chan") or a user (like "user")

- The other variables have obvious names.

This one-liner will the *delete* without any further confirmation all 100% duplicates but one based on their md5 hash in the current directory tree (i.e including files in its subdirectories).

Good for cleaning up collections of mp3 files or pictures of your dog|cat|kids|wife being present in gazillion incarnations on hd.

md5sum can be substituted with sha1sum without problems.

The actual filename is not taken into account-just the hash is used.

Whatever sort thinks is the first filename is kept.

It is assumed that the filename does not contain 0x00.

As per the good suggestion in the first comment, this one does a hard link instead:

create an archive of files with access time older than 5 days, and remove original files.

This is useful for command line 'recycle bins' and such like

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

remove file that has sensitive info safely. Overwrites it 33 times with zeros

This command is useful if you accidentally untar or unzip an archive in a directory and you want to automatically remove the files. Just untar the files again in a subdirectory and then run the above command e.g.

Sometimes Firefox crashes or is bad finished and the message the process is still running appear while it's not. This also works when you sharing account from a NIS server and try to open the browser on multiple computers.

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

Adds the stdout (standard output) to the beginning of logfile.txt. Change "command" to whatever command you like, such as 'ls' or 'date', etc. It does this by adding the output to a temporary file, then adding the previous contents of logfile.txt to the temp file, then copying the new contents back to the logfile.txt and removing the temp file.