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).

grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power

Terminal - grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power
find . -type f | parallel -j+0 grep -i foobar
2010-01-30 02:08:46
User: unixmonkey8046
Functions: find grep
2
Up
Down
grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power

Parallel does not suffer from the risk of mixing of output that xargs suffers from. -j+0 will run as many jobs in parallel as you have cores.

With parallel you only need -0 (and -print0) if your filenames contain a '\n'.

Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -P 4 -n 40 grep -i foobar
2009-08-05 23:18:44
User: ketil
Functions: find grep xargs
Tags: xargs grep parallel smp
3
Up
Down
grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power

xargs -P N spawns up to N worker processes. -n 40 means each grep command gets up to 40 file names each on the command line.

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Have you done some tests to estimate the gain ?

I haven't a multiprocessor computer but I not totally convinced.

I think find command is more limited by disk rate than by cpu, but I could be wrong.

Comment by Kysic 171 weeks and 6 days ago

It is very dependent on file system whether it is faster. But if the files are cached (e.g. if you just searched for another string), then it is definitely faster.

Comment by unixmonkey10455 146 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts