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

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Sudoers: bypass all password prompts

If you as the sole user of a computer at home only don’t like needing to repeatedly type a password each time you run a command, using ‘NOPASSWD’ in sudoers for your specific username is for you.

convert unixtime to human-readable

Rip a CD/DVD to ISO format.

An easy method to generate ISOs from CD/DVD media.

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"

Mostly silent FLAC checking (only errors are displayed)

FLAC's built in integrity checks are far more useful then devising a scheme to use MD5 sum files. This will check all the FLAC in a directory and output only errors. Remove the "s" after the "t" and it will be somewhat verbose in the check.

Symlink all files from a base directory to a target directory

Symlinks all files in the base directory to the target directory then lists all of the created symlinks.

Search commandlinefu from the command line

There's probably a more efficient way to do this rather than the relatively long perl program, but perl is my hammer, so text processing looks like a nail. This is of course a lot to type all at once. You can make it better by putting this somewhere: $ clf () { (curl -d "q=$@" http://www.commandlinefu.com/search/autocomplete 2>/dev/null) | egrep 'autocomplete|votes|destination' | perl -pi -e 's/$/\n\n/g;s/^ +|\([0-9]+ votes,//g;s/^\//http:\/\/commandlinefu.com\//g'; } Then, to look up any command, you can do this: $ clf diff This is similar to http://www.colivre.coop.br/Aurium/CLFUSearch except that it's just one line, so more in the spirit of CLF, in my opinion.

Perl Command Line Interpreter

Can also just use the debug mode like this.

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit

After this, just type: $ beepwhenup You need to install "beep" before this would make the beep sound. Save it in your .profile if you want to use it later WARNING: this command won't exit until it is successful. You won't be able to CONTROL+C out of it.

Check if you work on a virtual/physical machine in Linux

Command used to know if we are working on a virtual or physical machine. This command will use the dmidecode utility to retrieve hardware information of your computer via the BIOS. Run this command as root or with sudo.

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