Comments on: Five Quick Command Line Tips

By: Fireside Chats » Blog Archive » Useful Unix Commands

Fireside Chats » Blog Archive » Useful Unix Commands — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:24:24 +0000

[...] Five Quick Command Line Tips [...]

By: admin

admin — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:21:54 +0000

redduck666,

Thanks for the tip! The version of stat I had when writing the article did not have the printf option on stat. I am not sure if its new or I just missed it.

Yes, I am not overly concerned about a portability. I generally just write for the modern versions of coreutils and associated commands that come with modern versions of Linux.

By: redduck666

redduck666 — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:21:10 +0000

regarding your `Finding more fun’, stat(1) can be used to do the same thing more elegantly. it is not portable, but judging by the rest of your content i’d say you don’t care about that

By: admin

admin — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:03:06 +0000

eliott,

Good tip, thanks!

By: admin

admin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:56:03 +0000

ConcernedFellowBlogger,

Thanks…..

By: ConcernedFellowBlogger

ConcernedFellowBlogger — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:59:23 +0000

Your copyrighted content has been stolen:

http colon slash slash googit.blogspot.com/2008/01/five-quick-command-line-tips.html

By: eliott

eliott — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:19:59 +0000

If you use the alternate exec form, find will build longer lists of files to pass to rm, and it is faster than the default exec behavior.

user@box:~/test$ time find . -name “*.txt” -exec rm {} \;

real 0m18.198s
user 0m9.129s
sys 0m9.005s
user@box:~/test$ time find . -name “*.txt” -delete

real 0m0.207s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.196s
user@box:~/test$ time find . -name “*.txt” -exec rm {} \+

real 0m0.250s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.232s

delete is still faster for delete, but for other operations, using the + can speed things up considerably..granted the utility can accept more than one file arg at a time.

By: admin

admin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:38:50 +0000

thecubic,

Yes, BASH expansion is often much better than using seq. I often forget BASH will do this automagically!

Jeremy,

I love !$…its saves an unbelievable amount of mouse/keyboard work!

Thanks guys!

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 02:13:02 +0000

One I seem to use a lot is !$ This is the last string you typed. Best used if looking for something in a directory put you aren’t in that directory

$ ls /var/www/html/
index.html

$ vi !$index.html

Saves you some typing.

Another is cd – which takes you to the last directory you were in.

-Chino

By: thecubic

thecubic — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:27:55 +0000

Use stdin/stdout when stdin/stdout isn’t coded:

$ unzip -l – < r.zip
UnZip 5.52 of 28 February 2005, by Info-ZIP. Maintained by C. Spieler. Send
bug reports using http://www.info-zip.org/zip-bug.html; see README for details.

Usage: unzip [-Z] [-opts[modifiers]] file[.zip] [list] [-x xlist] [-d exdir]

$ unzip -l /dev/stdin < r.zip
Archive: /dev/stdin
Length Date Time Name
——– —- —- —-

Quickly access a numbered word list:

$ echo file{1..5}
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5