Commands tagged xargs sorted by votes

Commands tagged xargs (148)

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Find and delete thunderbird's msf files to make your profile work quickly again.

The thunderbird message datastores get corrupt some times causing random failures, compaction to fail and general suck in thunderbird. Removing them causes thunderbird to rebuild the indexes and makes things quick again.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

find ~/.thunderbird/*.default/ -name *.msf | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs rm {} \;

allrightname · 2010-06-04 12:35:24 6
find names of files ending in *log that have both foo and bar

Uses xargs to call the second grep with the first grep's results as arguments
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

grep -l bar *.log | xargs grep -l foo

dlebauer · 2011-01-10 19:54:46 3
Reorder file with max 100 file per folder

Take a folder full of files and split it into smaller folders containing a maximum number of files. In this case, 100 files per directory. find creates the list of files xargs breaks up the list into groups of 100 for each group, create a directory and copy in the files Note: This command won't work if there is whitespace in the filenames (but then again, neither do the alternative commands :-)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

files -type f | xargs -n100 | while read l; do mkdir $((++f)); cp $l $f; done

flatcap · 2011-02-15 23:15:16 4
Convert one's Java source file encoding

One of my friends committed his code in the encoding of GB2312, which broke the build job. I have to find his code and convert.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

find . -name "*.java" -type f -perm +600 -print | xargs -I _ sh -c 'grep -q hexianmao _ && iconv -f gb2312 -t utf8 -o _ -c _ '

Sunng · 2011-03-08 13:02:25 7
Clean-up release directories keeping the only the latest two

Deletes capistrano-style release directories (except that there are dashes between the YYYY-MM-DD) Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
user@server:~/apps/appname/releases$ ls
2010-12-02-121502  2010-12-01-215457
```
-1

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -Pv "^.$" | sort -rn --field-separator="-" | sed -n '3,$p' | xargs rm -rf

wilmoore · 2011-03-08 17:38:26 6
use ImageMagik to convert tint (hue rotation) of an icon set directory.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

mogrify -modulate 100,100,70 ../../icons/32x32/*.png

houghi · 2011-06-13 15:11:16 3
Find files and list them sorted by modification time
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

find -type f | xargs ls -1tr

unixmonkey50727 · 2013-03-20 16:43:54 4
Recursively change permissions on files, leave directories alone.

xargs is a more elegant approach to executing a command on find results then -exec as -exec is meant as a filtering flag.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

find /var/www/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

FiloSottile · 2013-03-28 11:10:30 6
Randomize lines (opposite of | sort)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

ls -1 | xargs ruby -e'puts ARGV.shuffle'

jacaetevha · 2014-01-17 17:42:08 7
Remove all files previously extracted from a tar(.gz) file.

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.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

tar -tf <file.tar.gz> | parallel rm

unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 08:28:16 3
add all files not under version control to repository

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.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

svn status |grep '\?' |awk '{print $2}'| parallel -Xj1 svn add

unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 08:47:54 3
archive all files containing local changes (svn)

xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). In this case if you have a file called '12" record'. Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem. Both solutions work bad if the number of files is more than the allowed line length of the shell.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

svn st | cut -c 9- | parallel -X tar -czvf ../backup.tgz

unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 11:43:16 3
List top ten files/directories sorted by size

If a directory name contains space xargs will do the wrong thing. Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ deals better with that. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
33M     a b
17M     libxnee
3.6M    doc
3.0M    gnee
```
-2

du -s * | sort -nr | head | cut -f2 | parallel -k du -sh

unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 12:59:14 6
Edit all "text" files (exclude binary and directories) in the current directory
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ls . | xargs file | grep text | sed "s/$.*$:.*/\1/" | xargs gedit

matthewbauer · 2010-02-08 02:06:40 6
find files containing specifc pattern on filename and specific patternts in its content, open all in textmate
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

find . -name "*noticia*" -name "*jhtm*" -name "*.tpl" -exec grep -li "id=\"col-direita\"" '{}' \; | xargs -n1 mate

irae · 2010-09-18 02:55:40 4
remove unneeded configuration files in debian

This will, for an application that has already been removed but had its configuration left behind, purge that configuration from the system. To test it out first, you can remove the last -y, and it will show you what it will purge without actually doing it. I mean it never hurts to check first, "just in case." ;)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

dpkg-query -l| grep -v "ii " | grep "rc " | awk '{print $2" "}' | tr -d "\n" | xargs aptitude purge -y

thepicard · 2009-04-28 19:25:53 11
backup and remove files with access time older than 5 days.

This deals nicely with files having special characters in the file name (space ' or "). Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

tar -zcvpf backup_`date +"%Y%m%d_%H%M%S"`.tar.gz `find <target> -atime +5 -type f` 2> /dev/null | parallel -X rm -f

unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 12:41:41 3
Kill multiple instances of a running process

Find and kill multiple instances of a process with one simple command.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

pgrep rouge-process | xargs sudo kill -9

mheadd · 2010-05-09 22:30:05 6
Revert all modified files in an SVN repo
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

svn revert .

zhenggc1 · 2013-03-13 06:07:42 4
use ImageMagik to convert tint (hue rotation) of an icon set directory.

see http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/color_mods/#modulate
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

/bin/ls *.png | xargs -l1 -I {} convert {} -modulate 100,100,70 ../../icons/32x32/{}

hute37 · 2011-06-13 14:35:10 4
Poll and print end of lates modified file

Watches for file modifications in the current directory and tails the file.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

watch 'ls -tr1 | tail -n1 | xargs tail'

batandwa · 2013-05-09 11:37:59 10
Copy all images to external hard-drive
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-8

ls *.jpg | xargs -n1 -i cp {} /external-hard-drive/directory

techie · 2013-05-09 08:33:01 10
Find broken symlinks
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-9

find . -type l | xargs file | grep broken

kineticrick · 2011-04-07 22:58:02 4
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Remove all hidden files in a directory

Remove all hidden files in a directory excluding current dir . and parent dir .. with .??* that means files with at least two characters.

make directory tree

list files recursively by size

Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file

Imagine you've started a long-running process that involves piping data, but you forgot to add the progress-bar option to a command. e.g. $ xz -dc bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program > summary . This command uses lsof to see how much data xz has read from the file. $ lsof -o0 -o -Fo FILENAME Display offsets (-o), in decimal (-o0), in parseable form (-Fo) This will output something like: . p12607 f3 o0t45187072 . Process id (p), File Descriptor (f), Offset (o) . We stat the file to get its size $ stat -c %s FILENAME . Then we plug the values into awk. Split the line at the letter t: -Ft Define a variable for the file's size: -s=$(stat...) Only work on the offset line: /^o/ . Note this command was tested using the Linux version of lsof. Because it uses lsof's batch option (-F) it may be portable. . Thanks to @unhammer for the brilliant idea.

find the biggest files recursively, no matter how many

This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit. This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.

Job Control

You're running a script, command, whatever.. You don't expect it to take long, now 5pm has rolled around and you're ready to go home... Wait, it's still running... You forgot to nohup it before running it... Suspend it, send it to the background, then disown it... The ouput wont go anywhere, but at least the command will still run...

list block devices

Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Fetch the Gateway Ip Address

This is to fetch the Gateway Ip Address of a machine. Use the below format to put the value in a variable if you wish to find the gateway ip in a script $GATEWAY=$(netstat -nr | awk 'BEGIN {while ($3!="0.0.0.0") getline; print $2}')

list files recursively by size

Update twitter via curl (and also set the "from" bit)

An improvement of the original (at: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2872/update-twitter-via-curl) in the sense that you see a "from cURL" under your status message instead of just a "from API" ;-) Twitter automatically links it to the cURL home page.

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Commands tagged xargs (148)

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