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Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Using xargs is better than: find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
12

find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

root · 2009-01-26 11:30:47 62
Display PHP files that directly instantiate a given class

This greps all PHP files for a given classname and displays both the file and the usage. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
tao/tests/filter/TestUrl.php:        $this->objFilter = new filter_Url();
tao/classes/local/view/Photos.php:        $objFilter  = new filter_Url();
```
1

find . -name "*.php" -exec grep \-H "new filter_" {} \;

root · 2009-01-26 10:43:09 73
Run the last command as root

Useful when you forget to use sudo for a command. "!!" grabs the last run command.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1219

sudo !!

root · 2009-01-26 10:26:48 250
Creates a customized search command

Creates a command alias ('cr' in the above example) that searches the contents of files matching a set of file extensions (C & C++ source-code in the above example) recursively within the current directory. Search configured to be in colour, ignore-case, show line numbers and show 4 lines of context. Put in shell initialisation file of your choice. Trivially easy to use, e.g: cr sha1_init Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
./openssl/signatures.c-600-xmlSecOpenSSLDsaSha1EvpInit(EVP_MD_CTX *ctx)
./openssl/signatures.c-601-{
./openssl/signatures.c:602:    return SHA1_Init(ctx->md_data);
./openssl/signatures.c-603-}
./openssl/signatures.c-604-
--
./openssl/signatures.c-706-    NULL,
./openssl/signatures.c-707-#else /* XMLSEC_OPENSSL_096 */
./openssl/signatures.c:708:    SHA1_Init,
./openssl/signatures.c-709-    SHA1_Update,
./openssl/signatures.c-710-    SHA1_Final,
```
0

alias cr='find . 2>/dev/null -regex '\''.*\.$c\|cpp\|pc\|h\|hpp\|cc$$'\'' | xargs grep --color=always -ni -C2'

chrisdrew · 2009-01-26 08:54:25 56
Outputs a sorted list of disk usage to a text file

Recursively searches current directory and outputs sorted list of each directory's disk usage to a text file. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
712     .
328     ./test
176     ./lib
144     ./doc
100     ./test/data
96      ./lib/rake
64      ./doc/release_notes
```
6

du | sort -gr > file_sizes

chrisdrew · 2009-01-26 01:12:54 62
Watch how fast the files in a drive are being deleted

This can be useful when a large remove operation is taking place.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
6

watch "df | grep /path/to/drive"

root · 2009-01-25 21:16:41 674
Execute a command at a given time

This is an alternative to cron which allows a one-off task to be scheduled for a certain time.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
266

echo "ls -l" | at midnight

root · 2009-01-25 21:07:42 85
Analyse an Apache access log for the most common IP addresses

This uses awk to grab the IP address from each request and then sorts and summarises the top 10.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
22

tail -10000 access_log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

root · 2009-01-25 21:01:52 47
Add SVN keywords property to all PHP and Javascript files
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

find . $ -name "*.php" -o -name "*.js" $ -exec svn propset svn:keywords Id {} \;

root · 2009-01-24 00:54:35 63
Count files beneath current directory (including subfolders)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
18

find . -type f | wc -l

root · 2009-01-23 17:19:32 74

Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT. Show Sample Output

106

ps aux | sort -nk +4 | tail

root · 2009-01-23 17:12:33 294

Checks all MySQL tables

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/myisamchk.html for further details. You can also repair all tables by running: myisamchk -r *.MYI
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

myisamchk /path/to/mysql/files/*.MYI

root · 2009-01-22 10:20:00 133
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Display the human-readable sizes of all files and folders in the current directory with 3 decimal places

To sort the list by file/directory size, insert `sort -n |` before `awk`.

print first n characters of any file in human readble form using hexdump

Usefull to determine unknown file type

How To Get the Apache Document Root

Grabs the Apache config file (yielded from httpd) and returns the path specified as DocumentRoot.

Create a backup of the file.

It will create a backup of the filename. The advantage is that if you list the folder the backups will be sorted by date. The command works on any unix in bash.

Use bash history with process substitution

Bash has a great history system of its commands accessed by the ! built-in history expansion operator (documented elsewhere on this site or on the web). You can combine the ! operator inside the process redirection

Find partition name using mount point

lsblk | grep mountpoint

Calculate md5 sums for every file in a directory tree

Alert on high ping to know if it's really laggy while playing

Online games have pretty good lag compensation nowadays, Sometimes though, you really want to get some warning about your latency, e.g. while playing Diablo III in Hardcore mode, so you know when to carefully quit the game b/c your flatmate started downloading all his torrents at once. This is done on Darwin. On Linux/*nix you would need to find another suitable command instead of `say` to spell out your latency. And I used fping because it's a little bit easier to get the latency value needed. Something similar with our regular ping command could look like this: $ while :; do a=$(ping -c1 google.com | grep -o 'time.*' | cut -d\= -f2 | cut -d\ -f1 | cut -b1-4); [[ $a > 40 ]] && say "ping is $a"; sleep 3; done

Find broken symlinks in the current directory and its subdirectories.

This is best run as root to avoid permission denials that can produce false positives. Obviously you can specify a directory in the usual way: $ find -L dirname -type l I can't remember where I read about this or who deserves the credit for it. The find(1) manual page hints strongly toward it, however.

Image to color palette generator

Extract a color palette from a image useful for designers. Example usage: $extract-palette myawesomeimage.jpg 4 Where the first argument is the image you want to extract a palette from. The second argument is the number of colors you want. It may be the case where you want to change the search space. In that case, change the -resize argument to a bigger or smaller result. See the ImageMagick documentation for the -resize argument.

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