http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070408062023352

From the cwd, recursively find all rar files, extracting each rar into the directory where it was found, rather than cwd. A nice time saver if you've used wget or similar to mirror something, where each sub dir contains an rar archive. Its likely this can be tuned to work with multi-part archives where all parts use ambiguous .rar extensions but I didn't test this. Perhaps unrar would handle this gracefully anyway?

find . -type f -iname '*.flac' # searches from the current folder recursively for .flac audio files | # the output (a .flac audio files with relative path from ./ ) is piped to while read FILE; do FILENAME="${FILE%.*}"; flac -cd "$FILE" | lame -b 192 - "${FILENAME}.mp3"; done # for each line on the list: # FILE gets the file with .flac extension and relative path # FILENAME gets FILE without the .flac extension # run flac for that FILE with output piped to lame conversion to mp3 using 192Kb bitrate Show Sample Output

.flac is the filetype. /Volumes/Music/FLAC is the destination. Show Sample Output

sometimes I need list from path with max limit for recursive depth directory listing

Output of this command is the difference of recursive file lists in two directories (very quick!). To view differences in content of files too, use the command submitted by mariusbutuc (very slow!): diff -rq path_to_dir1 path_to_dir2 Show Sample Output

The above command will set the GID bit on all directories named .svn in the current directory recursively. This makes the group ownership of all .svn folders be the group ownership for all files created in that folder, no matter the user. This is useful for me as the subversion working directory on my server is also the live website and needs to be auto committed to subversion every so often via cron as well as worked on by multiple users. Setting the GID bit on the .svn folders makes sure we don't have a mix of .svn metadata created by a slew of different users.

Works recusivley in the specified dir or '.' if none given. Repeatedly calls 'find' to find a newer file, when no newer files exist you have the newest. In this case 'newest' means most recently modified. To find the most recently created change -newer to -cnewer. Show Sample Output

an alternative

Recursively replace a string in files with lines matching string. Lines with the string "group name" will have the first > character replaced while other > characters on other lines will be ignored. Show Sample Output

Changed out the for loop for an xargs. It's a tad shorter, and a tad cleaner.

recursive find and replace. important stuff are grep -Z and zargs -0 which add zero byte after file name so sed can work even with file names with spaces.

This command is recursive and will delete in all directories in ".". It will find and delete all files not specified with ! -name "pattern". In this case it's file extensions. -type f means it will only find files and not directories. Finally the -delete flag ask find to delete what it matches. You can test the command by running it first without delete and it will list the files it will delete when you run it. Show Sample Output

finds all epub files in the current directory and all child directories and converts them to .mobi format. all of the ebook-convert -options are optional; the only parameters you are required to pass are the incoming file and the outgoing file, with the extension. Has been tested on Ubuntu 10.10

-exec sh -c 'var={}; do something with var' lets you do things in a sub-shell while it's faster to type, I'm not sure if dozens of subshells execute quicker than the while loops.

extracts path to each md5 checksum file, then, for each path, cd to it, check the md5sum, then cd - to toggle back to the starting directory. greps at the end to remove cd chattering on about the current directory.

wipes directory/ "recursively" "w/o confirming" deletion in "quick" mode for "10" passes.

In order to unrar several files in different subfolders, you just need to launch this command in your parent folder in order to have your files ready for manipulation and already extracted; I did not put anything to delete the original rar files