Sometimes in my work I need to do something really cleaver and fast. Here is a bunch of my ‘helpers’ to make that happen
Grep in gzip files
zgrep search_string filename.gz
This will return all rows in file.gz that contains search_string
Get filenames from files in current directory containing search string
grep -l search_string *
The -l option tells grep to only return the filenames of the file that contains search_string
Delete files in current directory containing search string
grep -l search_string * | xargs rm -f
Here we send a list of filenames to the xargs program which will do ‘rm -f’ on each one
Count files in directory (NOTE: this will also count . and .. as lines)
ls -la | wc -l
The wc option -l counts lines instead of words
Count lines in file (NOTE this only works if the file contains newlines otherwise it will naturally return 0)
wc -l filename
This will count all newline characters in a file
Get filnames in current directory of files that contains search_string1 OR search_string2
egrep -l 'search_string1|search_string2' *
The -l option works the same way as for grep. It only returns the filename of the matched files. I use egrep here to be able to use the regular expression OR operator ‘|’.
Delete files in directory that does NOT contain search_string1 OR search_string2 OR search_string3
egrep -lv 'search_string1|search_string2|search_string3' dir/* | xargs rm -f
The -v option tells egrep to return everything NOT equal to the pattern
Copy files in one directory to another directory where filname matches egrep regular expresion
cp $(find fromdir | egrep 'file[0-9]{1,2}.xml' ) todir/
This fetches all files with name file0.xml and to file99.xml from ‘fromdir’ and copies them to ‘todir’. Works just fine with mv if you rather move then copy your files
Copy files from current directory containing search_string to a new directory
cp $(grep -l search_string *) toDir/
Validate all xml files in a directory
xmllint -noout dir/*
If there are any errors in any file the error will be displayed. If no errors – no output from the command. I use the –noout option because I do not want to display all the xmls which is default behaviour of xmllint
Find specific xml tags from a directory of files that contain one row xmls
xmllint --format * | grep tagname
This will first make all xml into nice print. After that we get the desired tag through grep
Pipe output from xmllint (or other program) to Vim
xmllint --format * | vim -
This will make nice print on all xml files in current directory and then put them all on one page in Vim. The trick is in the ‘-‘ sign. This will make Vim read input from stdin instead from a file.
Search and replace text in a file with sed
sed -i 's/find/replace/g' file.txt
This will find the word ‘find’ in file.txt and replace it with the word ‘replace’. The changes will be made directly to the file
Print all text between tag1 and tag2
sed -n "/tag1/,/tag2/p" <filename>
This will print all text between tag1 and tag2 in the file <filename>. I use this to get xml messages from logfiles where many xml messages are in one file
Working with columns
ls -l | awk -F" " '{print $5, $6, $7, $8, $9}'
This will select the last 5 columns of a ls -l command (‘size’, ‘month’, ‘day’, ‘time’ and ‘filename’. Delimiter in this case is space (” “).
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