Commands tagged grep (409)

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

fuman, an alternative to the 'man' command that shows commandlinefu.com examples
Example: fuman sed

Serve current directory tree at http://$HOSTNAME:8080/

rsync directory tree including only files that match a certain find result.
'-mtime -10' syncs only files newer 10 days (-mtime is just one example, use whatever find expressions you need) printf %P: File's name with the name of the command line argument under which it was found removed. this way, you can use any src directory, no need to cd into your src directory first. using \\0 in printf and a corresponding --from0 in rsync ensures that even filenames with newline characters work (thanks syssyphus for #3808). both, #1481 and #3808 just work if you either copy the current directory (.) , or the filesystem root (/), otherwise the output from find and the source dir from rsync just don't match. #7685 works with an arbitrary source directory.

vim as a pager - similar to less command but with color
use vim like less command pager but with color highlighting = pretty :p also u can use /usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.sh

list files recursively by size

Numeric zero padding file rename
This uses Perl's rename utility (you may have to call it as prename on your box) and won't choke on spaces or other characters in filenames. It will also zero pad a number even in filenames like "vacation-4.jpg".

Run a command that has been aliased without the alias
Most distributions alias cp to 'cp -i', which means when you attempt to copy into a directory that already contains the file, cp will prompt to overwrite. A great default to have, but when you mean to overwrite thousands of files, you don't want to sit there hitting [y] then [enter] thousands of times. Enter the backslash. It runs the command unaliased, so as in the example, cp will happily overwrite existing files much in the way mv works.

List only hidden files
You can omit the -d to see what's inside directories. In that case, you may want -a to see dotfiles inside those directories. (Otherwise you don't need -a since you're explicitly looking at them.)

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.

Search commandlinefu.com from the command line using the API
for me the above command didn't work for more than one argument but this one does


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: