This command will kill all processes using a directory. It's quick and dirty. One may also use a -9 with kill in case regular kill doesn't work. This is useful if one needs to umount a directory. Show Sample Output

Are there any creative pieces of music that can be created using beep and the shell? I'd love to hear it!

This command finds the 5 (-n5) most frequently updated logs in /var/log, and then does a multifile tail follow of those log files. Alternately, you can do this to follow a specific list of log files: sudo tail -n0 -f /var/log/{messages,secure,cron,cups/error_log} Show Sample Output

I sometimes (due to mismanagement!) end up with files in a git repo which have had their modes changed, but not their content. This one-liner lets me revert the mode changes, while leaving changed-content files be, so I can commit just the actual changes made.

You're behind on your TV catch-up, but how far behind? This command tries to open mplayer against all files in the current dir. If it's a video file it will contain ID_LENGTH, which is summed and output in hours, minutes and seconds. Someone better at awk could probably reduce this down a lot. Show Sample Output

No need to loop when we have `xargs`. The sed command filters out the first line of `show databases` output, which is always "Database".

Calculates the size on disk for each package installed on the filesystem (or removed but not purged). This is missing the | sort -rn which would put the biggest packges on top. That was purposely left out as the command is slightly on the slow side Also you may need to run this as root as some files can only be checked by du if you can read them ;) Show Sample Output

No problem with word splitting. That should works on many Unix likes. Show Sample Output

- grep for the word in a files, use recursion (to find files in sub directories), and list only file matches -| xargs passes the results from the grep command to sed -sed -i uses a regular expression (regex) to evaluate the change: s (search) / search word / target word / g (global replace)

# ### ### # # ### ### # # # ## # # ### # # # # ### ## # # # # # # ### # # # # ### # # # # # ### ##### # # ##### # # # ### # # ### # # # # # ### # # ### # # ##### ### ### # ##### ### ##### # Show Sample Output

Goes through all files in the directory specified, uses `stat` to print out last modification time, then sorts numerically in reverse, then uses cut to remove the modified epoch timestamp and finally head to only output the last 10 modified files. Note that on a Mac `stat` won't work like this, you'll need to use either: find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f '%m%t%Sm %12z %N' | sort -nr | cut -f2- | head or alternatively do a `brew install coreutils` and then replace `stat` with `gstat` in the original command. Show Sample Output

Opposite: Convert an one-liner to script: foo() { <one-liner> ; } ... typeset -f foo ... unset -f foo

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

Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies. Show Sample Output

Useful if you want get all the md5sum of files but you want exclude some directories. If your list of files is short you can make in one command as follow: find . -type d \( -name DIR1 -o -name DIR2 \) -prune -o -type f -exec md5sum {} \; Alternatively you can specify a different command to be executed on the resulting files.

Just a handy way to get all the unique links from inside all the html files inside a directory. Can be handy on scripts etc. Show Sample Output

Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type. Show Sample Output

Retrieve top ip threats from http://isc.sans.org/sources.html and add them into iptables output chain.

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.

Figures out total line contribution per author for an entire GIT repo. Includes binary files, which kind of mess up the true count. If crashes or takes too long, mess with the ls-file option at the start: git ls-files -x "*pdf" -x "*psd" -x "*tif" to remove really random binary files git ls-files "*.py" "*.html" "*.css" to only include specific file types Based off my original SVN version: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2787/prints-total-line-count-contribution-per-user-for-an-svn-repository Show Sample Output

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