Commands using file sorted by votes

Commands using file (166)

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Cat files in a directory; for loop command

Original submitted version would break if any filenames had whitespaces in them. The command is a Bad Idea anyhow, because you will end up `cat`ing a binary or something else specacularly bad.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for file in ./*; do cat "$file"; sleep 0.3

DopeGhoti · 2011-11-28 20:10:57 3
Write in a text file the contents of all the zip files in a directory.

It can be used to create an index of a backup directory or to find some file.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for file in *.zip; do unzip -l "$file" >> archiveindex.txt ; done;

chon8a · 2013-05-02 01:43:26 7
Reset the last modified time for each file in a git repo to its last commit time
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for file in $( git ls-files ); do echo $file; touch -t $(git --no-pager log --date=local -1 --format="%ct" $file | php -r 'echo @date( "YmdHi.s", trim( file_get_contents( "php://stdin" ) ) );') $file; done

westonruter · 2015-07-01 00:28:06 13
stores the number of lines of "file" in a variable to use in a loop
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

count=`wc -l file | cut -d ' ' -f1`

vmplacco · 2009-02-25 21:21:47 5
convert all WAVs from any format (MS ADPCM) to PCM

I needed this for wine.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

for file in $(find -type f -iname "*wav"); do mv $file "$file"_orig.WAV; mplayer -ao pcm "$file"_orig.WAV -ao pcm:file=$file; done

oernii · 2009-04-06 21:36:04 6
determine if a shared library is compiled as 32bit or 64bit

file displays a files type the -L flag means follow sym-links (as libraries are often sym-linked to another this behavior is likely preferred) more complex behavior (*two* grep commands!) could be used to determine if the file is or is not a shared library.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

file -L <library> | grep -q '64-bit' && echo 'library is 64 bit' || echo 'library is 32 bit'

infinull · 2010-03-07 06:31:35 3
Recursive and alphabetical orderly cp
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

for file in `find *| sort -n | sed 's% %?%g'`; do echo "${file//?/ }"; cp --parents "${file//?/ }" /destinity_folder/ ;done

juanmi · 2011-05-23 16:34:08 7
Remove blank lines from a file and save output to new file
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

sed '/^$/d' file >newfile

haplo · 2009-09-24 19:22:49 5
download file1 file2 file3 file4 .... file 100

With counter format [001, 002, ..., 999] , nice with pictures or wallpapers collections.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

for file in $(seq -f '%03.f' 1 $TOTAL ); do echo "($file/$TOTAL)"; curl -f -O http://domain.com/Name_$file.ext; done

nordri · 2010-01-12 15:23:44 6
a find and replace within text-based files, for batch text replacement, not using perl
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-5

for file in `find . -iname "FILENAME"`; do cat $file | sed "s/SEARCH_STRING/REPLACE_STRING/" > $file.tmp; mv $file.tmp $file; done

unixmonkey6754 · 2010-02-24 13:46:29 3
Numerate files, rename files in a directory by incremental number

Renames files in a directory to incremental numbers, following alphabetic order. The command does not maintain extensions.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-5

declare -i i; i=0; for file in *; do i=`expr $i+1`; mv "$file" $i; done;

themiurgo · 2010-08-26 12:24:38 5
Numerate files, rename files in a directory by incremental number
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-5

declare -i i=0 ; for file in * ; do i=$[$i+1] ; mv "$file" $i; done

pepin · 2010-08-26 12:40:58 3
list with full path
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-6

for file in *; do echo $PWD/$file; done

Velenux · 2011-12-16 13:12:00 4
remove all dead symbolic links in a directory
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-8

for i in $(file * | grep broken | cut -d : -f 1); do rm $i; done

Znuff · 2010-11-02 16:10:42 10
list with full path

Also lists hidden files, current dir and topdir.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-8

for file in * .*; do echo $PWD/$file; done

marek158 · 2011-12-16 13:42:07 3
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
‹ First < 5 6 7

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Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)

I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Securely destroy data on given device

Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

Colorize make, gcc, and diff output

Colorize output of make, gcc/g++ or diff, making it easier to read at a glance. They are not distributed with make, diff or gcc, but are usually available in the repositories.

Get line count for any file ending with extension recursively rooted at the current directory.

How to run a command on a list of remote servers read from a file

dsh - Distributed shell, or dancer?s shell ;-) you can put your servers into /etc/dsh/machines.list than you don't have to serperate them by commata or group them in different files and only run commands for this groups dsh -M -c -a -- "apt-get update"

Gentoo: Get the size of all installed packets, sorted

On a Gentoo system, this command will tell you which packets you have installed and sort them by how much space they consume. Good for finding out space-hogs when tidying up disk space.

Blacklist usb storage

Some times you may ban usb to protect thefting of your personal data. Blacklist the usb_storage module by adding blacklist usb_storage to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. To load the module manually, $sudo modprobe usb_storage.

Put a console clock in top right corner

This puts a clock in the top right of the terminal. This version doesn't use tput, but uses escape codes

Compare two directories

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

Kill all processes belonging to a user

This is a 'killall' command equivalent where it is not available. Prior to executing it, set the environment variable USERNAME to the username, whose processes you want to kill or replace the username with the $USERNAME on the command above. Side effect: If any processes from other users, are running with a parameter of $USERNAME, they will be killed as well (assuming you are running this as root user) [-9] in square brackets at the end of the command is optional and strongly suggested to be your last resort. I do not like to use it as the killed process leaves a lot of mess behind.

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Commands using file (166)

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