Commands using xargs sorted by votes

Commands using xargs (769)

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find and delete files smaller than specific size

Probably neither faster nor better than -delete in find. It's just that I generally dislike teaching find builtin actions.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find . -type f -size -80k -print0|xargs -0 rm

DeepThought · 2012-09-19 12:15:32 4
Change permissions for all files in the current directory
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find ./ -type f | xargs sudo chmod 644

unixmonkey39631 · 2012-09-26 00:11:14 10
Change permission for all directories inside the current one
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find site/ -type d | xargs sudo chmod 755

unixmonkey39631 · 2012-09-26 00:12:37 4
Size for all directories inside the current one
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find . -type d -maxdepth 1 | xargs du -sh

unixmonkey39631 · 2012-09-26 14:58:27 4
Compares two source directories, one original and one post configure and deletes the differences in the source folder

Good for when your working on building a clean source install for RPM packaging or what have you. After testing, run this command to compare the original extracted source to your working source directory and it will remove the differences that are created when running './configure' and 'make'.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

diff ../source-dir.orig/ ../source-dir.post/ | grep "Only in" | sed -e 's/^.*\:.$\<.*\>$/\1/g' | xargs rm -r

bigc00p · 2012-10-17 14:12:32 9
SAR - Get the monthly queue length average using sar -q for both the runq-sz and plist-sz.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

ls /var/log/sa/sa[0-9]*|xargs -I '{}' sar -q -f {}| awk '/Average/'|awk '{runq+=$2;plist+=$3}END{print "average runq-sz:",runq/NR; print "average plist-sz: "plist/NR}'

omatictost · 2012-10-25 17:04:48 7
find . -name "*" -print | xargs grep -s pattern
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find . -name "*" -print | xargs grep -s pattern

RedFox · 2012-11-28 13:09:35 4
find . $ -name \*.cgi -o -name \*.txt -o -name \*.htm -o -name \*.html -o -name \*.shtml $ -print | xargs grep -s pattern
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find . $ -name \*.cgi -o -name \*.txt -o -name \*.htm -o -name \*.html -o -name \*.shtml $ -print | xargs grep -s pattern

RedFox · 2012-11-28 17:01:37 4
Matching Strings
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

grep -l <string-to-match> * | xargs grep -c <string-not-to-match> | grep '\:0'

RedFox · 2012-11-28 17:03:46 8
Find and replace text within all files within a directory

find . = will set up your recursive search. You can narrow your search to certain file by adding -name "*.ext" or limit buy using the same but add prune like -name "*.ext" -prune xargs =sets it up like a command line for each file find finds and will invoke the next command which is perl. perl = invoke perl -p sets up a while loop -i in place and the .bak will create a backup file like filename.ext.bak -e execute the following.... 's/ / /;' your basic substitute and replace.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find . | xargs perl -p -i.bak -e 's/oldString/newString/;'

RedFox · 2012-11-28 17:11:18 4
Purge frozen messages in Exim

do 1000 at a time so that if your doodoo is deep you can avoid avoid "command-line too big" error
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

exipick -zi | xargs --max-args=1000 exim -Mrm

jasen · 2012-12-12 20:46:22 5
Delete all apps in a heroku org
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

heroku manager:apps --org org-name | xargs -I {} heroku apps:delete {} --confirm {}

ericfode · 2012-12-20 07:42:24 7
List all text files (exclude binary files)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find -type f | xargs file | grep ".*: .* text" | sed "s;$.*$: .* text.*;\1;"

phunehehe · 2012-12-24 07:53:52 5
Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

This is a modified version of the OP, wrapped into a bash function. This version handles newlines and other whitespace correctly, the original has problems with the thankfully rare case of newlines in the file names. It also allows checking an arbitrary number of directories against each other, which is nice when the directories that you think might have duplicates don't have a convenient common ancestor directory.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find-duplicates () { find "$@" -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\0" | sort -rnz | uniq -dz | xargs -0 -I{} -n1 find "$@" -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate; }

mpeschke · 2013-01-23 23:20:26 5
How to find all open files by a process in Solaris 10

Executing pfiles will return a list of all descriptors utilized by the process We are interested in the S_IFREG entries since they are pointing usually to files In the line, there is the inode number of the file which we use in order to find the filename. The only bad thing is that in order not to search from / you have to suspect where could possibly be the file. Improvements more than welcome. lsof was not available in my case Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
user@machine# for i in `pfiles 25925|grep S_IFREG|awk '{print $5}'|awk -F":" '{print $2}'`; do find /path/tmp -inum $i |xargs ls -lah; done
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 910 Jan 26  2012 /path/tmp/file1.prm
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 6.3K Jan 20 06:30 /path/tmp/file2.rpt
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 86K Jan 23 23:34 /path/tmp/file3.log
-rwxrw-r-- 1 user group 65 Dec 26 07:27 /path/tmp/file4.pcr
```
0

for i in `pfiles pid|grep S_IFREG|awk '{print $5}'|awk -F":" '{print $2}'`; do find / -inum $i |xargs ls -lah; done

giorger · 2013-01-24 13:57:19 4
Find corrupted jpeg image files

This checks jpeg data and metadata, should be grepped as needed, maybe a -B1 Warning for the first, and a -E "WARNING|ERROR" for the second part....
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find . -iname '*jpg' -print0 | xargs -0 exiftool -warning; find . -iname '*jpg' -print0 | xargs -0 jpeginfo -c

unixmonkey46191 · 2013-01-28 16:44:19 4

Find stock debian package config files that have been modified since installation

This functionality seems to be missing from commands like dpkg. Ideally, I want to duplicate the behavior of rpm --verify, but it seems difficult to do this in one relatively short command pipeline. Show Sample Output

dpkg-query -Wf '${Package}\n' | xargs dpkg --status | sed '/^Conffiles:/,/^Description:/!d;//d' | awk '{print $2 " " $1}' | md5sum -c 2>/dev/null | grep FAILED$ | cut -f1 -d':'

hallmarc · 2013-01-31 16:52:38 10

Copy modified files between two Git commits

Show Sample Output

git diff --name-only --diff-filter=AMXTCR HEAD~2 HEAD | xargs -l -I{} cp --parents --verbose "{}" target_dir

batandwa · 2013-02-11 08:12:40 4

copy zip files which contains XXX
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

for i in *RET.zip; do unzip -l "$i"| grep -B 4 XXX | grep RET| sed "s/.\+EPS/EPS/" |xargs -I '{}' cp '{}' out/'{}';done;

tsonkomirchev · 2013-02-13 17:24:37 5
Purge completely packages on debian / ubuntu

completely remove those packages that leave files in debian / ubuntu marked with rc and not removed completely with traditional tools
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

dpkg -l | grep ^rc | awk '{ print $2}' | xargs apt-get -y remove --purge

Richzendy · 2013-02-15 01:34:37 7
Kill a lot of process once a time
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

ps aux | grep <process> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -i -t kill -9 {}

szimbaro · 2013-02-27 12:33:30 4
Instant threadpool
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

cat item_list | xargs -n1 -P<n> process_item

sanchan89 · 2013-03-06 20:25:17 31
find str in in a directory which file extension is .php
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find ./ -type f -name "*.php" | xargs grep -n "name" -r {}

motopig · 2013-03-08 11:03:49 4
Ensure path permissions from '.' prior to root

`pwd` returns the current path `grep -o` prints each slash on new line perl generates the paths sequence: './.', './../.', ... `readlink` canonicalizes paths (it makes the things more transparent) `xargs -tn1` applies chmod for each of them. Each command applied is getting printed to STDERR. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
chmod 755 /tmp/1/2/3 
chmod 755 /tmp/1/2 
chmod 755 /tmp/1 
chmod 755 /tmp 
```
0

pwd|grep -o '/'|perl -ne '$x.="./.";print`readlink -f $x`'|xargs -tn1 chmod 755

luke_skywalker · 2013-03-14 12:03:44 7
Recursively search your directory tree files for a string
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

alias gfind='find . -print0 | xargs -0 egrep -I '

pdunham · 2013-03-16 03:20:49 4
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exit if another instance is running

Gets the X11 Screen resolution

Requires xrandr, grep and, sed.

show git commit history

list files recursively by size

Copy file content to X clipboard

(only when vim has been compiled with +clipboard)

Random file naming

Get number of users on a minecraft server

I'm flat-out surprised that minecraft directory services require servers install multiple modifications to their server code, when the directories could fetch this information on their own.

Google URL shortener

use curl and sed to shorten an url via goo.gl

Ask for a password, the passwd-style

You can ask repeatedly for a non-blank password using this function: function read_password() { while [ ! -n "$USER_PASSWORD" ]; do read -s -p"Password: " USER_PASSWORD if [ ! -n "$USER_PASSWORD" ]; then echo "ERROR: You must specify a valid password, please try again" fi echo done } Also you can set a time out (in seconds) to write the password read -t 10 -s -p"Password: " USER_PASSWORD_VARIABLE if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "Time out!" fi

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)

swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

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Commands using xargs (769)

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