There once was a day I needed this info. Show Sample Output

Center the output text in max line length of buffered output pipe; Show Sample Output

It does not work without the verbose mode (-v is important)

In this example, the command will recursively find files (-type f) under /some/path, where the path ends in .mp3, case insensitive (-iregex). It will then output a single line of output (-print0), with results terminated by a the null character (octal 000). Suitable for piping to xargs -0. This type of output avoids issues with garbage in paths, like unclosed quotes. The tr command then strips away everything but the null chars, finally piping to wc -c, to get a character count. I have found this very useful, to verify one is getting the right number of before you actually process the results through xargs or similar. Yes, one can issue the find without the -print0 and use wc -l, however if you want to be 1000% sure your find command is giving you the expected number of results, this is a simple way to check. The approach can be made in to a function and then included in .bashrc or similar. e.g. count_chars() { tr -d -c "$1" | wc -c; } In this form it provides a versatile character counter of text streams :) Show Sample Output

Counts the files present in the different directories recursively. One only has to change maxdepth to have further insight in the directory hierarchy. Found at unix.stackexchange.com: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4105/how-do-i-count-all-the-files-recursively-through-directories Show Sample Output

Count your source and header file's line numbers. This ignores blank lines, C++ style comments, single line C style comments. This will not ignore blank lines with tabs or multiline C style comments.

Adapted from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1358540/how-to-count-all-the-lines-of-code-in-a-directory-recursively#answer-1359246

OpenOffice, LibreOffice and OO Impress wordcount

Very quick! Based only on the content sizes and the character counts of filenames. If both numbers are equal then two (or more) directories seem to be most likely identical. if in doubt apply: diff -rq path_to_dir1 path_to_dir2 AWK function taken from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2912224/find-duplicates-lines-based-on-some-delimited-fileds-on-line Show Sample Output

Shorter version using --tag

Mandriva Linux includes a security tool called "msec" (configurable via "draksec"). One of the many things it regularily checks for is world writeable files. If any are found, it writes the list to /var/log/security/writable.today. "wc -l" simply counts the number of lines in the file. This number should be low. Browse through /var/log/security/writable.today and consider if any of those files *need* to be world-writeable (and if not, modify the permissions. eg: "chmod o-w $file"). A large number of world-writeable files may indicate that umask is not correctly set in /etc/profile (or ${HOME}/.bash_profile) but could also indicate poor security configuration or even malicious activity. Show Sample Output

I use this (well I normally just drop the F=*.log bit and put that straight into the awk command) to count how many times I get referred from another site. I know its rough, its to give me an idea where any posts I make are ending up. The reason I do the Q="query" bit is because I often want to check another domain quickly and its quick to use CTRL+A to jump to the start and then CTRL+F to move forward the 3 steps to change the grep query. (I find this easier than moving backwards because if you group a lot of domains with the pipe your command line can get quite messy so its normally easier to have it all at the front so you just have to edit it & hit enter). For people new to the shell it does the following. The Q and F equals bits just make names we can refer to. The awk -F\" '{print $4}' $F reads the file specified by $F and splits it up using double-quotes. It prints out the fourth column for egrep to work on. The 4th column in the log is the referer domain. egrep then matches our query against this list from awk. Finally wc -l gives us the total number of lines (i.e. matches). Show Sample Output

get files without extensions, get ASCII and utf-8 as "text/plain" Show Sample Output

Can be used to help perform some SEO optimizations. Show Sample Output

List files and sizes

This is really fast :) time find . -name \*.c | xargs wc -l | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}' 204753 real 0m0.191s user 0m0.068s sys 0m0.116s Show Sample Output