Locate broken symlinks in the current directory. Also useful, to remove broken links: find . -type l ! -exec test -e {} \; -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Finds all corrupted jpeg files in current directory and its subdirectories. Displays the error or warning found. The jpeginfo is part of the jpeginfo package in debian. Should you wish to only get corrupted filenames, use cut to extract them : find ./ -name *jpg -exec jpeginfo -c {} \; | grep -E "WARNING|ERROR" | cut -d " " -f 1 Show Sample Output

Setting: You have a lot of jpg files in a directory. Maybe your public_html folder which is readable on the net because of Apache's mod_userdir. All those files from the current folder will be dropped into a file called gallery.html as image tags that can be viewed within a web browser locally or or over the Internet. Original: find . -iname "*.jpg" -exec echo "<img src=\"{}\">" >> gallery.html \;

Using xargs is better than: find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.

Oracle DBA remove some logfiles which are still open by the database and he is complaining the space has not been reclaimed? Use the above command to find out what PID needs to be stopped. Or alternatively recover the file via: cp /proc/pid/fd/filehandle /new/file.txt Show Sample Output

Note the g for global in the perl expression; without it, only the first occurrence in the name would be replaced. Show Sample Output

This command looks for a single file named emails.txt which is located somewhere in my home directory and cd to that directory. This command is especially helpful when the file is burried deep in the directory structure. I tested it against the bash shells in Xubuntu 8.10 and Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6

Sqlite database keeps collecting cruft as time passes, which can be cleaned by the 'vacuum;' command. This command cleans up the cruft in all sqlite files relating to the user you have logged in as. This command has to be run when firefox is not running, or it will exit displaying the pid of the firefox running.

use find with rsync

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files Using -delete is faster than: find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm {} + find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \;

... plus do a sort according frequency Show Sample Output

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

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. Show Sample Output

change the *.avi to whatever you want to match, you can remove it altogether if you want to check all files.

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