Commands by rafar (1)

  • Recursively remove all empty directories

    It starts in the current working directory. It removes the empty directory and its ancestors (unless the ancestor contains other elements than the empty directory itself). It will print a failure message for every directory that isn't empty. This command handles correctly directory names containing single or double quotes, spaces or newlines. If you do not want only to remove all the ancestors, just use: find . -empty -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir


    0
    find . -empty -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir -p
    rafar · 2013-07-01 02:44:57 7

What's this?

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.

Share Your Commands

Check These Out

list files recursively by size

mkdir & cd into it as single command
The biggest advantage of this over the functions is that it is portable.

generate a randome 10 character password

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"

Clean your broken terminal
When some console full-screen program (minicom, vi, some installers) breaks down your terminal, try this command to revert all options to "sane" settings (sane is a built-in combo of a lot of stty options)

Display text as though it is being typed out in real time
Pipe Viewer allows you to monitor the progress of a data transfer or command, or to show the time elapsed, among other things. In this use, it limits the transfer rate of the echo command to 10 bytes per second, making your text appear to be typed out in real time as in Hollywood movies. Fun!

Truncate long strings in columns and use custom header names
Using the --table-truncate ( -T ) option, you can specify the columns you will allow to be truncated. This helps when you have some columns that are unusually long, or a small terminal window. In this example we will print out the /etc/passwd file in columns. We are using a colon as our separator ( -s: ), defining that we want table output ( -t ), defining the column names ( -N ) and allowing the column NAME to be truncated ( -T ).

Rename files in batch

watch snapshots commit in VMware ESX
To monitor .vmdk files during snapshot deletion (commit) on ESX only (ESXi doesn't have the watch command): 1. Navigate to the VM directory containing .vmdk files. # watch "ls -tough --full-time *.vmdk" where: -t sorts by modification time -o do not list group information (to narrow the output) -u sorts by access time -g only here for the purpose to easily remember the created mnemonic word 'tough' -h prints sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G) --full-time sets the time style to full-iso and does not list user information (to narrow the output) optionally useful parameters to the watch command: -d highlight changes between updates -n seconds to wait between updates (default is 2) -t turn off printing the header

Alert visually until any key is pressed

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: