One-liners

Gnu/Linux command line "one-liners"

Most probably you are pondering how to solve a specific problem using the command line. The following solutions are specific cases that I encountered; it is most likely that you have found similar solutions. The purpose of this repository is to represent an on-line substitution of my paper-notebook of one-liners.

find - searching and command execution

• Reverse the content of all specified text files using find and vi commands

  • find . -iname '*.DPT' -exec vi '{}' -c ':g/^/m0' -c ':wq' \;

• Copy one file into all sub folders in the current working directory

  • find . -type d -exec cp file.name '{}' \;

• swap a file using find, cp and rename (in two steps) in case two files are in separate folders or sub folders. The 'old.f' content and filename is swapped to 'new.f'.

  • find . -iname '*.f' -exec cp ./path-to-file/new.f '{}' \;
  • find . -iname 'new.f' -exec rename 's/old.f/new.f/' '{}' \;

• search files in-between specific date

  • using find

    • find . -newermt '2015-03-03' ! -newermt '2015-03-04'

    • find . -newermt 'Nov 11 03:56' ! -newermt 'Nov 11 03:59' -printf '%Tc %p\n'

      where -printf '%Tc %p\n' will print out the exact date

      to be more specific use: -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td--%TH:%TM:%TS'

      %p prints out the path

      adding | sort -n to the end will do the evident sorting

  • using ls and awk

    • ls -ltr | grep 'Nov.*5.*10' | awk '{print $NF}'

    and copy them to another folder:

    • ls -ltr | grep 'Nov.*5.*10' | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs -i cp '{}' folder

• returning path string with find:

  • find `pwd` .... will return the absolute path, since find is giving output relative to the input

  • find . .....

  • find . -iname '*x' -printf '%p\n' will print out the filename only without the path

• find with subfolder depth control

  • find . -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.py*

• find partial path and file

  • find -path '*.git/logs/HEAD' using iname instead of path does not work

• excluding folders from find

  • find . -path ./some/path -prune -o -iname '*some*' -print

  or without -prune

  • find . -iname '*some*' -not -path "./some_path/*"

  the * is very much needed, otherwise it will exclude only the given path and not all paths below

  • in addition one can exclude a given folder at any level by
  • find . -iname '*some*' -not path "*/some_path/*"

• combine find file by name and path

  • find . -iname "*.pbz2 -path "./2022*"

• combining regular expression with find. For example find all filenames that are longer then 5 characters

  • find -regextype posix-egrep -regex '.*[^/]{5}'

• multiple find ; to use logical operators with find through regular expression

  • find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex "(.*bgg.*\.*add.*)" AND
  • find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex "(.*bgg.*|.*add.*)" OR

• chaining commands inside find, for example rename specific files and move them to another folder

  • find . -iname '*.dat' -exec rename 's/dat/DPT/' '{}' \; -exec mv '{}' ~/home/somewhere \;

• remove files but skip some

  • rm !(*.zip) or rm !(*.zip|*.dat)
  • rm -r */ to remove only folders

• cleaning git repo

  • find . -name "*.pyc" -exec git rm {} \;

• sorting using sort

  • sort -k 2,2n -k 3 file.txt

    where -k 2,2n -k 3 means to sort data using the given column number. First, it will sort 2nd column (date dd field) and then 3rd column (time). Found here

• a compilation of sed one-liners

  • http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt

• networking using nmcli

  • Connect to netwrok nmcli device wifi connect <SSID> password <password>
  • connect to netwrok nmcli con up id <SSID>
  • check available devices nmcli d
  • check all wifi networks in the area with signal strength nmcli d wifi

du - estimate file space usage

• du, df commands to investigate storage space:
  • du -sh ./* | sort -h
  • watch -n 1 "df -h | grep "Filesystem" && df -h | grep '/$' && df | grep '/$'"
  • du -sh .[^.]* - for inspection of hidden folders only
  • du -sh --exclude=/media / - to exclude a folder from the calcuation of folder sizes

screen command

• screen command add to ./.screenrc: termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@. For logging the std output of screen funciton into a file us the -L flag:
  • screen -L -S NAME_OF_SESSION

Related:

vi commands

awk stuff

file text manipulations

Disclaimer

The fact you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should! ;)

Worth checking out:

jlevy's art-of-command-line

zeef/caleb.xu

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