Commands using xargs sorted by votes

Commands using xargs (769)

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Recursively remove all empty directories

Remove all empty directories below the current directory. If directories become empty as the results of this, remove those too.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -type d | tac | xargs rmdir 2> /dev/null

drmaciver · 2010-03-23 11:54:38 6
kill all instances of an annoying or endless, thread-spawning process
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ps auxwww | grep outofcontrolprocess | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

unixmonkey8311 · 2010-06-30 15:52:52 6
Recompress all text files in a subdirectory with lzma
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -name '*.txt' | grep -v '\.lzma$' | xargs -n 1 lzma -f -v -3

cout · 2010-07-21 16:58:41 4
Find PHP files

xargs avoids having to remember the "{} \;" (although definitely a useful thing to know. Unfortunately I always forget it). xargs version runs 2x faster on my test fwiw. edit: fixed to handle spaces in filenames correctly.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i "search phrase"

randy909 · 2010-07-27 20:52:37 4
find files containing specifc pattern on filename and specific patternts in its content, open all in textmate
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -name "*noticia*" -name "*jhtm*" -name "*.tpl" -exec grep -li "id=\"col-direita\"" '{}' \; | xargs -n1 mate

irae · 2010-09-18 02:55:40 4
Bulk install

I used this to mass install a lot of perl stuff. Threw it together because I was feeling *especially* lazy. The 'perl' and the 'module' can be replaced with whatever you like.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

apt-cache search perl | grep module | awk '{print $1;}' | xargs sudo apt-get install -y

captwheeto · 2010-11-26 14:00:39 3
Delete all files from a locate output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

locate munin | xargs rm -r

strzel_a · 2011-03-14 11:47:00 4
Reload gnome-panel

I have some problems with gnome panel which does not load completely leaving me without the actual GUI. This commands helps to kill the gnome-panel process then it should be relaunch automatically.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

pgrep -lf gnome-panel | awk '{if ($2=="gnome-panel") print $1}' | xargs kill -9

UnixNeko · 2011-06-12 12:23:27 13
Get the rough (german) time from Twitter by @zurvollenstunde

Calc the rough time from Twitter. Now with leading Zeroes. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
20:11
```
-2

printf "%02d:%02d\n" $(curl -s "http://search.twitter.com/search?from=zurvollenstunde&rpp=1" | grep -E '(Es ist jetzt|ago)' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g;s/[^[:digit:]]//g' | xargs )

torrid · 2011-06-19 18:16:00 3
List by size all of the directories in a given tree.

This command lists all the directories in SEARCHPATH by size, displaying their size in a human readable format. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
257M    /var/
147M    /var/cache
144M    /var/cache/apt
110M    /var/cache/apt/archives
96M     /var/lib
67M     /var/lib/apt
66M     /var/lib/apt/lists
22M     /var/lib/dpkg
20M     /var/lib/dpkg/info
15M     /var/log
```
-2

SEARCHPATH=/var/; find $SEARCHPATH -type d -print0 | xargs -0 du -s 2> /dev/null | sort -nr | sed 's|^.*'$SEARCHPATH'|'$SEARCHPATH'|' | xargs du -sh 2> /dev/null

moogmusic · 2011-07-06 08:21:58 4
Find/Replace in a bunch of files and keep a log of the changes

This is a more concise answer to http://blog.commandlinekungfu.com/2011/09/episode-158-old-switcheroo.html in my opinion.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -type f | xargs grep -n "Old Text" | tee filesChanged.txt | sed 's/:.*$//' | xargs sed -i 's/Old Text/New Text/g

moogmusic · 2011-09-06 10:28:36 3
find files owned by root and make them your own again

be careful where you execute this from do a 'sudo ls' beforehand to prime sudo to not ask for your password
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -user root | xargs sudo chown me:me

riansanderson · 2012-04-24 18:29:13 6
kill defunct processes by killing their parents

defunct processes (zombies) usually have to be killed by killing their parent processes. this command retrieves such zombies and their immediate parents and kills all of the matching processes.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ps afx | grep defunct -B 1 | grep -Eo "[0-9]{3,}" | xargs kill -9

pholz · 2012-04-27 16:16:34 3
Remove the Apple quarantine

When downloading files on a Mac, Apple adds the x-attribute: com.apple.quarantine. Often, this makes it so you can't even run a ./configure. This command gets rid of the quarantine for all files in the current directory.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . | xargs xattr -d com.apple.quarantine

brockangelo · 2012-05-09 23:06:51 8
download a list of urls
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cat urls.txt | xargs -n1 curl -O --max-time 10 --retry 3 --retry-delay 1

kev · 2012-05-14 06:38:06 4
grep files by date and delete

executed on SLES 11.2
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ls -ltr |grep 'May 12'|awk '{print $9;}'|xargs rm -v

harpo · 2012-06-04 12:31:41 3
exec chmod to subfiles

Using xargs is usually much quicker as it does not have to execute chmod for every file
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod a-x

jlaunay · 2012-06-11 07:28:30 5
Find all files with setuid bit
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find / -xdev $ -perm -4000 $ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

anhpht · 2012-11-16 01:11:53 5
a find and replace within text-based files
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find /path/ -type f -exec grep -l '<string of text>' {} \; | xargs sed -i -e 's%<string of text>%<new text string>%g'

leonteale · 2013-02-07 18:47:01 5
Resize images with mogrify with lots of options

First use find to find all the images that end with jpg or JPG in the current dir and all its children. Then pipe that to xargs. The -I{} makes it so spaces in filenames don't matter. The 1024">" makes it so it takes any image greater in dimension than 1024 and resizes them to 1024 width, but keeping aspect ratio on height. Then it sets the image quality to 40. Piping it through xargs means you avoid the file count limit, and you could run this on your entire file system if you wanted.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.JPG' | xargs -I{} mogrify -resize 1024">" -quality 40 {}

topher1kenobe · 2013-06-20 15:20:29 9
Arguments too long
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ls | grep ".txt$" | xargs -i WHATEVER_COMMAND {}

4Aiur · 2014-03-12 14:56:12 8
Get the password for PostgreSQL backend db for VMware vRA
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

grep -i s2enc /etc/vcac/server.xml | sed -e 's/.* password=\"$[^\"]*$\".*/\1/' | xargs -n 1 vcac-config prop-util -d --p 2>/dev/null; echo

tsener · 2017-03-28 14:11:55 19
small CPU benchmark with PI, bc and time.

Broken in two parts, first get the number of cores with cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep proc|wc -l and create a integer sequence with that number (xargs seq), then have GNU parallel loop that many times over the given command. Cheers! Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
...
66983895228684783123552658213144957685726243344189303968642624341077\
3226978028073189154411010446823252716201052652272111660396

real	0m31,847s
user	0m59,085s
sys	0m0,151s
```
-2

time cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep proc|wc -l|xargs seq|parallel -N 0 echo "scale=4000\; a$1$\*4" '|' bc -l

kostis · 2018-12-06 05:15:24 674
Re-execute a command using a saved /proc/pid/cmdline file

Replace $CMDLINE_FILENAME with the name of the cmdline file you copied from /proc/pid, and $COMMAND with the command to execute with those arguments.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

tail -zn+2 $CMDLINE_FILENAME | xargs -0 $COMMAND

Sparkette · 2020-06-23 05:31:45 120
Counts the number of TODOs in files with extension EXT found from the current dir.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

find . -name "*.EXT" | xargs grep -n "TODO" | wc -l

hardest · 2009-03-22 18:43:32 5
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Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance

You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

vmstat/iostat with timestamp

Also useful with iostat, or pretty much anything else you want timestamped.

Realtime lines per second in a log file

Using tail to follow and standard perl to count and print the lps when lines are written to the logfile.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS

Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Know SELinux status

Usefule to check whether SELinux is in force or disabled. Though you need to be superuser while execute this command.

Tell what is encoded in a float, given its HEX bytes

It handles all possible combination of the hex bytes, including NaNs, Infinities, Normalized and Subnormal Numbers... $ This crazy DC stuff spent me a few days to write, optimize, polish and squeeze so that it works within the tight 255 character bound... $ You can modify it easily for other IEEE754 numbers, say, half, double, double-extended, quadruple $ (I hope someone will find this useful and submit more dc code to commandlinefu!)

ls not pattern

Hides some entries from listing.

convert single digit to double digits

each number in a file name gets expanded to the number of digets provided as arg_1 of the arguments in rjust_file_nums. Put the funciton in the .bashrc file. Be sure to $ source ~/.bashrc so that the function will be accessible from bash.

Sort contents of a directory with human readable output

Show sizes of all files and directories in a directory in size order. $du -hs * | sort -hr for reverse order. Taken from http://serverfault.com/questions/62411/how-can-i-sort-du-h-output-by-size

Git diff last two commits

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Commands using xargs (769)

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