Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Recurse through directories easily

Terminal - Recurse through directories easily
find . -type f | while read file; do cp $file ${file}.bak; done
2009-03-01 23:42:49
User: atoponce
Functions: cp find read
1
Up
Down
Recurse through directories easily

This is a simple case of recursing through all directories, adding the '.bak' extension to every file. Of course, the 'cp $file $file.bak' could be any code you need to apply to your recursion, including tests, other functions, creating variables, doing math, etc. Simple and clean recursion.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

When it comes to acting on all these files, find can do it directly :

find . -type f -exec cp {} {}.bak \;
Comment by raphink 224 weeks ago

right, except when you want to execute multiple lines of code. then find gets ugly with all the -exec switches. then when introducing logic, it gets even worse. no, with this example, you're using find for the recursion, then a while loop to operate on files, so you can nest several commands easily.

Comment by atoponce 224 weeks ago

You left out the quotation marks around your variable references -

this code as it is will break when filenames have spaces.

Comment by asmoore82 223 weeks and 2 days ago

just for insanity's sake, *even with* the quotation marks, the code still breaks with filenames with newlines in them, but this does not:

USAGE: recfindexec

[code]

recfindexec() {

for dirs in "${1%/}"/*/; do [ -d "$dirs" ] && recfindexec "$dirs" "$2"; done

for files in "${1%/}"/$2; do [ -f "$files" ] && {

#YOUR CMDS IN HERE EX:

ls "$files"

} done

}

:P

Comment by asmoore82 223 weeks and 2 days ago

^^USAGE: recfindexec search_dir wildcard

ex:

recfindexec Videos "*.avi"
Comment by asmoore82 223 weeks and 1 day ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts