This will quickly display files last changed in a directory, with the newest on top. Show Sample Output

This alias is super-handy for me because it quickly shows the details of each file in the current directory. The output is nice because it is sortable, allowing you to expand this basic example to do something amazing like showing you a list of the newest files, the largest files, files with bad perms, etc.. A recursive alias would be: alias LSR='find -mount -printf "%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G %TF_%TR %CF_%CR %AF_%AR %#15s [%Y] %p\n" 2>/dev/null' From: http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

This modifies the output of ls so that the file size has commas every three digits. It makes room for the commas by destructively eating any characters to the left of the size, which is probably okay since that's just the "group".   Note that I did not write this, I merely cleaned it up and shortened it with extended regular expressions. The original shell script, entitled "sl", came with this description:    : '  : For tired eyes (sigh), do an ls -lF plus whatever other flags you give  : but expand the file size with commas every 3 digits. Really helps me  : distinguish megabytes from hundreds of kbytes...  :  : Corey Satten, corey@cac.washington.edu, 11/8/89  : '   Of course, some may suggest that fancy new "human friendly" options, like "ls -Shrl", have made Corey's script obsolete. They are probably right. Yet, at times, still I find it handy. The new-fangled "human-readable" numbers can be annoying when I have to glance at the letter at the end to figure out what order of magnitude is even being talked about. (There's a big difference between 386M and 386P!). But with this nifty script, the number itself acts like a histogram, a quick visual indicator of "bigness" for tired eyes. :-) Show Sample Output

move filename/rename filenames with Uppercase to lowercase in current directory Show Sample Output

search the newest *.jpg in the directory an make a copy to newest.jpg. Just change the extension to search other files. This is usefull eg. if your webcam saves all pictures in a folder and you like the put the last one on your homepage. This works even in a directory with 10000 pictures.

time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a - 1,"\n"}' 205413 real 0m0.497s user 0m0.220s sys 0m0.268s time { ls |wc -l; } 205413 real 0m3.776s user 0m3.340s sys 0m0.424s ********* ** EDIT: turns out this perl liner is mostly masturbation. this is slightly faster: find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l sh-3.2$ time { find . -maxdepth 1|wc -l; } 205414 real 0m0.456s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.328s ** EDIT: now a slightly faster perl version perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' sh-3.2$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' 205414 real 0m0.415s user 0m0.176s sys 0m0.232s

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

A shorter version Show Sample Output

Was playing with the shell. It struck to me, just by rearranging the parameters, i was able to remember what they did and in a cool way. Enter the 'hitlar' mode. bash-3.2$ ls -hitlar Shows all items with inodes, in list view, human readable size, sorted by modification time in reverse, bash-3.2$ ls -Fhitlar Shows the same with classification info. Add the hitlar mode alias to your .bashrc. bash-3.2$ echo "alias hitlar='ls -Fhitlar'" >> ~/.bashrc bash-3.2$ hitlar bash-3.2$ hitlar filename Show Sample Output

Alternatively, ls -F | grep /\$ but will break on directories containing newlines. Or the safe, POSIX sh way (but will miss dotfiles): for i in *; do test -d "./$i" && printf "%s\n" "$i"; done

or tree -ifsF --noreport .|sort -n -k2|grep -v '/$' (rows presenting directory names become hidden)

Sometimes I would like to see hidden files, prefix with a period, but some files or folders I never want to see (and really wish I could just remove all together). Show Sample Output

Substitute for #11720 Can probably be even shorter and easier. Show Sample Output

zsh: list of files sorted by size, greater than 100mb, head the top 5. '**/*' is recursive, and the glob qualifiers provide '.' = regular file, 'L' size, which is followed by 'm' = 'megabyte', and finally '+100' = a value of 100

You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular. Show Sample Output

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Tested with GNU and BSD ls. Show Sample Output

With this version, you can list all symlinks in the current directory (no subdirectories), and have it list both the link and the target. Show Sample Output

list all txt files order by time, newest first