no fancy grep stuff here.

For those who don't have the symlinks command, you can use readlink. This command is not straightforward because readlink is very picky. The backslash in front of 'ls' means not to use an alias (e.g. color escape codes from an aliased 'ls' could mess up readlink), and the -1 (one) means to print the entries separated by newlines. xargs -l (the letter L) means to process each input separated by newlines as separate commands.

Today I needed to choose an icon for an app. My simpler way: put all of /usr/share/icons in myicons folder and brows'em with nautilus. Then rm -r 'ed the entire dir. Show Sample Output

This command will find all files recursively containing the phrase entered, represented here by "searchphrase". This particular command searches in all php files, but you could change that to just be html files or just log files etc. Show Sample Output

Improvement of the command "Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)" when searching for duplicate files in a directory containing a subversion working copy. This way the (multiple dupicates) in the meta-information directories are ignored. Can easily be adopted for other VCS as well. For CVS i.e. change ".svn" into ".csv": find -type d -name ".csv" -prune -o -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type d -name ".csv" -prune -o -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate Show Sample Output

Finds all C++, Python, SWIG files in your present directory (uses "*" rather than "." to exclude invisibles) and counts how many lines are in them. Returns only the last line (the total). Show Sample Output

Possible simplification of egrep-awk-sort with find and -exec with xargs. Show Sample Output

Works with files containing spaces and for very large directories.

I like this better than some of the alternatives using -exec, because if I want to change the string, it's right there at the end of the command line. That means less editing effort and more time to drink coffee. Show Sample Output

for when a program is hogging the sound output. finds, and kills. add -9 to the end for wedged processes. add in 'grep ^program' after lsof to filter. Show Sample Output

Here is how to replicate the directory structure in the current directory to a destination directory (given by the variable DESTDIR), without copying the files.

unset PROMPT_COMMAND to disable. Show Sample Output

Download google video with wget. Or, if you wish, pass video URL to ie mplayer to view as stream. 1. VURL: replace with url. I.e. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=12312312312312313# 2. OUPUT_FILE : optionally change to a more suited name. This is the downloaded file. I.e. foo.flv # Improvements greatly appreciated. (close to my first linux command after ls -A :) ) Breakedown pipe by pipe: 1. wget: html from google, pass to stdout 2. grep: get the video url until thumbnailUrl (not needed) 3. grep: Strip off everything before http:// 4. sed: urldecode 5. echo: hex escapes 6. sed: stipr of tailing before thumbnailUrl 7. wget: download. Here one could use i.e. mplayer or other...

Useful for ripping wallpaper from 4chan.org/wg

Robust means of moving all files up by a directory. Will handle dot files, filenames containing spaces, and filenames with almost any printable characters. Will not handle filenames containing a single-quote (but if you are moving those, it's time to go yell at whoever created them in the first place).

If you want to pull all of the files from a tree that has mixed files and directories containing files, this will link them all into a single directory. Beware of filesystem files-per-directory limits.

So you are in directory with loads of pictures laying around and you need to quickly scan through them all

Use case: folder with flac files with tree structure ../artist/album/number-title.flac 1) convert flac->mp3 in the same folder: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6341/convert-all-.flac-from-a-folder-subtree-in-192kb-mp3 2) search for mp3 files and recreate tree structure to another path: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/8853/copy-selected-folder-found-recursively-under-src-retaining-the-structure 3) move all mp3 files to that new folder: this command

For instance: find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

Tells you everything you could ever want to know about all files and subdirectories. Great for package creators. Totally secure too. On my Slackware box, this gets set upon login: LS_OPTIONS='-F -b -T 0 --color=auto' and alias ls='/bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS' which works great. Show Sample Output