If you have the fdupes command, you'll save a lot of typing. It can do recursive searches (-r,-R) and it allows you to interactively select which of the duplicate files found you wish to keep or delete.

Search for files and list the 20 largest. find . -type f gives us a list of file, recursively, starting from here (.) -print0 | xargs -0 du -h separate the names of files with NULL characters, so we're not confused by spaces then xargs run the du command to find their size (in human-readable form -- 64M not 64123456) | sort -hr use sort to arrange the list in size order. sort -h knows that 1M is bigger than 9K | head -20 finally only select the top twenty out of the list Show Sample Output

I needed a way to search all files in a web directory that contained a certain string, and replace that string with another string. In the example, I am searching for "askapache" and replacing that string with "htaccess". I wanted this to happen as a cron job, and it was important that this happened as fast as possible while at the same time not hogging the CPU since the machine is a server. So this script uses the nice command to run the sh shell with the command, which makes the whole thing run with priority 19, meaning it won't hog CPU processing. And the -P5 option to the xargs command means it will run 5 separate grep and sed processes simultaneously, so this is much much faster than running a single grep or sed. You may want to do -P0 which is unlimited if you aren't worried about too many processes or if you don't have to deal with process killers in the bg. Also, the -m1 command to grep means stop grepping this file for matches after the first match, which also saves time. Show Sample Output

Run this in the directory you store your music in. mp3gain and vorbisgain applies the ReplayGain normalization routine to mp3 and ogg files (respectively) in a reversible way. ReplayGain uses psychoacoustic analysis to make all files sound about the same loudness, so you don't get knocked out of your chair by loud songs after cranking up the volume on quieter ones.

By putting the "-not \( -name .svn -prune \)" in the very front of the "find" command, you eliminate the .svn directories in your find command itself. No need to grep them out. You can even create an alias for this command: alias svn_find="find . -not \( -name .svn -prune \)" Now you can do things like svn_find -mtime -3

Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs

will purge: only installed apps: /^ii/!d avoiding current kernel stuff: /'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d using app names: s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/ avoiding stuff without a version number: /[0-9]/!d

This revision to my command (command #8851) was called for when it failed to find the parent package of 'rlogin', which is really a deep symbolic link to /usr/bin/ssh. This revision fixes this newfound issue, while ensuring fixes of other older issues work too. Show Sample Output

I modify 4077 and marssi commandline to simplify it and skip an error when parsing the first line of lsmod (4077). Also, it's more concise and small now. I skip using xargs ( not required here ). This is only for GNU sed. For thoses without GNU sed, use that : modinfo $(lsmod | awk 'NR>1 {print $1}') | sed -e '/^dep/s/$/\n/g' -e '/^file/b' -e '/^desc/b' -e '/^dep/b' -e d

Parallel does not suffer from the risk of mixing of output that xargs suffers from. -j+0 will run as many jobs in parallel as you have cores. With parallel you only need -0 (and -print0) if your filenames contain a '\n'. Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

List out all the names from the zip file and pass it to xargs utility to delete each one of them

xargs -P N spawns up to N worker processes. -n 40 means each grep command gets up to 40 file names each on the command line.

With this form you dont need to cut out target directory using grep/sed/etc.

Use if you have pictures all over the place and you want to copy them to a central location Synopsis: Find jpg files translate all file names to lowercase backup existing, don't overwrite, preserve mode ownership and timestamps copy to a central location

xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this: touch important_file touch 'not important_file' ls not* | xargs rm Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

Using `-exec cmd {} +` causes find to build the command using all matching filenames before execution, rather than once per file.

Convert some SVG files into PNG using ImageMagick's convert command. Run the conversions in parallel to save time. This is safer than robinro's forkbomb approach :-) xargs runs four processes at a time -P4

If you're like me and want to keep all your music rated, and you use xmms2, you might like this command. I takes 10 random songs from your xmms2 library that don't have any rating, and adds them to your current playlist. You can then rate them in another xmms2 client that supports rating (I like kuechenstation). I'm pretty sure there's a better way to do the grep ... | sed ... part, probably with awk, but I don't know awk, so I'd welcome any suggestions. Show Sample Output

This pipeline will find, sort and display all files based on mtime. This could be done with find | xargs, but the find | xargs pipeline will not produce correct results if the results of find are greater than xargs command line buffer. If the xargs buffer fills, xargs processes the find results in more than one batch which is not compatible with sorting. Note the "-print0" on find and "-0" switch for perl. This is the equivalent of using xargs. Don't you love perl? Note that this pipeline can be easily modified to any data produced by perl's stat operator. eg, you could sort on size, hard links, creation time, etc. Look at stat and just change the '9' to what you want. Changing the '9' to a '7' for example will sort by file size. A '3' sorts by number of links.... Use head and tail at the end of the pipeline to get oldest files or most recent. Use awk or perl -wnla for further processing. Since there is a tab between the two fields, it is very easy to process. Show Sample Output

Do the same as pssh, just in shell syntax. Put your hosts in hostlist, one per line. Command outputs are gathered in output and error directories.

Preserve file structure when coping and exclude some file o dir patterns Show Sample Output