I'm trying to delete the first largest regular files from the given directory, but it doesn't work for files which contain whitespace caracters.
My code (it works if the files doesn't contain whitespace caracters):
find mydir -type f -exec du -ahb {} + | sort -n -r | cut -f2 | head -n 10 | xargs rm -i
I also tried this, but it gives an error message:
find mydir -type f -exec du -ahb {} + -print 0 | sort -n -r | cut -f2 | head -n 10 | xargs -0 rm -i
The following should work at least with GNU coreutils 8.25 and newer :
find mydir -type f -exec du -0b {} + | sort -znr | cut -zf2 | head -zn 10 | xargs -0pn 1 rm
I made sure every command handled and outputted NUL bytes (\0) separated records rather than linefeed separated records :
du outputs NUL-separated records with -0
sort, cut and head handle and output NUL-separated records with -z
xargs handles NUL-separated records with -0
Additionally, I removed the interactive mode of rm and asked xargs to handle that instead (-p), because xargs didn't provide a prompt to rm when invoking it. I had to limit the number of parameters given at once to rm to 1 for this to work (xargs' -n 1 parameter). There might be a way to preserve the -i and provide rm with an interface to your prompt, but I don't know how.
Last point : I removed du's -human-readable mode because it would have made the sort often fail and it didn't serve any purpose since the filesizes were never displayed to an human.
I have a directory with a large number of files. I am attempting to search for text located in at least one of the files. The text is likely located in one of the more recent files. What is the command to do this? I thought it would look something like ls -t | head -5 | grep abaaba.
For example, if I have 5 files returned from ls -t | head -5:
- file1, file2, file3, file4, file5, I need to know which of those files contains abaaba.
It's not really clear what you are trying to do. But I assume the efficiency is your main goal. I would use something like:
ls -t | while read -r f; do grep -lF abaaba "$f" && break;done
This will print only first file containing the string and stops the search. If you want to see actual lines use -H instead of -l. And if you have regex instead of mere string drop -F which will make grep run slower however.
ls -t | while read -r f; do grep -H abaaba "$f" && break;done
Of course if you want to continue the search I'd suggest dropping "&& break".
ls -t | while read -r f; do grep -HF abaaba "$f";done
If you have some ideas about the time frame, it's good idea to try find.
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime -2 -exec grep -HF abaaba {} \;
You can raise the number after -mtime to cover more than last 2 days.
If you're just doing this interactively, and you know you don't have spaces in your filenames, then you can do:
grep abaaba $(ls -t | head -5) # DO NOT USE THIS IN A SCRIPT
If writing this in an alias or for repeat future use, do it the "proper" way that takes more typing, but that doesn't break on spaces and other things in filenames.
If you have spaces but not newlines, you can also do
(IFS=$'\n' grep abaaba $(ls -t | head -5) )
I'm trying to use du command for every directory in the current one. So I'm trying to use code like this:
ls | du -sb
But its not working as expected. It outputs only size of current '.' directory and thats all.
The same thing is with echo
ls | echo
Outputs empty line. Why is this happening?
Using a pipe sends the output (stdout) of the first command, to stdin (input) of the child process (2nd command). The commands you mentioned don't take any input on stdin. This would work, for example, with cat (and by work, I mean work like cat run with no arguments, and just pass along the input you give it):
ls | cat
For your applications, this is where xargs comes in. It takes piped input and gives it as arguments to the command specified. So, you can make it work like:
ls | xargs du -sb
Beware that by default xargs will break its input on spaces, so if your filenames contain spaces this won't work as you want. So, in this particular case, this would be better:
du -sb *
Use command substitution, like this:
du -sb $(ls -d */)
$ find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -exec du -sb {} \;
or
$ ls -d */ | xargs du -sb
After a few searches from Google, what I come up with is:
find my_folder -type f -exec grep -l "needle text" {} \; -exec file {} \; | grep text
which is very unhandy and outputs unneeded texts such as mime type information. Any better solutions? I have lots of images and other binary files in the same folder with a lot of text files that I need to search through.
I know this is an old thread, but I stumbled across it and thought I'd share my method which I have found to be a very fast way to use find to find only non-binary files:
find . -type f -exec grep -Iq . {} \; -print
The -I option to grep tells it to immediately ignore binary files and the . option along with the -q will make it immediately match text files so it goes very fast. You can change the -print to a -print0 for piping into an xargs -0 or something if you are concerned about spaces (thanks for the tip, #lucas.werkmeister!)
Also the first dot is only necessary for certain BSD versions of find such as on OS X, but it doesn't hurt anything just having it there all the time if you want to put this in an alias or something.
EDIT: As #ruslan correctly pointed out, the -and can be omitted since it is implied.
Based on this SO question :
grep -rIl "needle text" my_folder
Why is it unhandy? If you need to use it often, and don't want to type it every time just define a bash function for it:
function findTextInAsciiFiles {
# usage: findTextInAsciiFiles DIRECTORY NEEDLE_TEXT
find "$1" -type f -exec grep -l "$2" {} \; -exec file {} \; | grep text
}
put it in your .bashrc and then just run:
findTextInAsciiFiles your_folder "needle text"
whenever you want.
EDIT to reflect OP's edit:
if you want to cut out mime informations you could just add a further stage to the pipeline that filters out mime informations. This should do the trick, by taking only what comes before :: cut -d':' -f1:
function findTextInAsciiFiles {
# usage: findTextInAsciiFiles DIRECTORY NEEDLE_TEXT
find "$1" -type f -exec grep -l "$2" {} \; -exec file {} \; | grep text | cut -d ':' -f1
}
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file | grep -P text | cut -d: -f1 | xargs grep -Pil "search"
This is unfortunately not space save. Putting this into bash script makes it a bit easier.
This is space safe:
#!/bin/bash
#if [ ! "$1" ] ; then
echo "Usage: $0 <search>";
exit
fi
find . -type f -print0 \
| xargs -0 file \
| grep -P text \
| cut -d: -f1 \
| xargs -i% grep -Pil "$1" "%"
Another way of doing this:
# find . |xargs file {} \; |grep "ASCII text"
If you want empty files too:
# find . |xargs file {} \; |egrep "ASCII text|empty"
How about this:
$ grep -rl "needle text" my_folder | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -r -0 file | grep -e ':[^:]*text[^:]*$' | grep -v -e 'executable'
If you want the filenames without the file types, just add a final sed filter.
$ grep -rl "needle text" my_folder | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -r -0 file | grep -e ':[^:]*text[^:]*$' | grep -v -e 'executable' | sed 's|:[^:]*$||'
You can filter-out unneeded file types by adding more -e 'type' options to the last grep command.
EDIT:
If your xargs version supports the -d option, the commands above become simpler:
$ grep -rl "needle text" my_folder | xargs -d '\n' -r file | grep -e ':[^:]*text[^:]*$' | grep -v -e 'executable' | sed 's|:[^:]*$||'
Here's how I've done it ...
1 . make a small script to test if a file is plain text
istext:
#!/bin/bash
[[ "$(file -bi $1)" == *"file"* ]]
2 . use find as before
find . -type f -exec istext {} \; -exec grep -nHi mystring {} \;
Here's a simplified version with extended explanation for beginners like me who are trying to learn how to put more than one command in one line.
If you were to write out the problem in steps, it would look like this:
// For every file in this directory
// Check the filetype
// If it's an ASCII file, then print out the filename
To achieve this, we can use three UNIX commands: find, file, and grep.
find will check every file in the directory.
file will give us the filetype. In our case, we're looking for a return of 'ASCII text'
grep will look for the keyword 'ASCII' in the output from file
So how can we string these together in a single line? There are multiple ways to do it, but I find that doing it in order of our pseudo-code makes the most sense (especially to a beginner like me).
find ./ -exec file {} ";" | grep 'ASCII'
Looks complicated, but not bad when we break it down:
find ./ = look through every file in this directory. The find command prints out the filename of any file that matches the 'expression', or whatever comes after the path, which in our case is the current directory or ./
The most important thing to understand is that everything after that first bit is going to be evaluated as either True or False. If True, the file name will get printed out. If not, then the command moves on.
-exec = this flag is an option within the find command that allows us to use the result of some other command as the search expression. It's like calling a function within a function.
file {} = the command being called inside of find. The file command returns a string that tells you the filetype of a file. Regularly, it would look like this: file mytextfile.txt. In our case, we want it to use whatever file is being looked at by the find command, so we put in the curly braces {} to act as an empty variable, or parameter. In other words, we're just asking for the system to output a string for every file in the directory.
";" = this is required by find and is the punctuation mark at the end of our -exec command. See the manual for 'find' for more explanation if you need it by running man find.
| grep 'ASCII' = | is a pipe. Pipe take the output of whatever is on the left and uses it as input to whatever is on the right. It takes the output of the find command (a string that is the filetype of a single file) and tests it to see if it contains the string 'ASCII'. If it does, it returns true.
NOW, the expression to the right of find ./ will return true when the grep command returns true. Voila.
I have two issues with histumness' answer:
It only list text files. It does not actually search them as
requested. To actually search, use
find . -type f -exec grep -Iq . {} \; -and -print0 | xargs -0 grep "needle text"
It spawns a grep process for every file, which is very slow. A better solution is then
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -IZl . | xargs -0 grep "needle text"
or simply
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -I "needle text"
This only takes 0.2s compared to 4s for solution above (2.5GB data / 7700 files), i.e. 20x faster.
Also, nobody cited ag, the Silver Searcher or ack-grep¸as alternatives. If one of these are available, they are much better alternatives:
ag -t "needle text" # Much faster than ack
ack -t "needle text" # or ack-grep
As a last note, beware of false positives (binary files taken as text files). I already had false positive using either grep/ag/ack, so better list the matched files first before editing the files.
Although it is an old question, I think this info bellow will add to the quality of the answers here.
When ignoring files with the executable bit set, I just use this command:
find . ! -perm -111
To keep it from recursively enter into other directories:
find . -maxdepth 1 ! -perm -111
No need for pipes to mix lots of commands, just the powerful plain find command.
Disclaimer: it is not exactly what OP asked, because it doesn't check if the file is binary or not. It will, for example, filter out bash script files, that are text themselves but have the executable bit set.
That said, I hope this is useful to anyone.
I do it this way:
1) since there're too many files (~30k) to search thru, I generate the text file list daily for use via crontab using below command:
find /to/src/folder -type f -exec file {} \; | grep text | cut -d: -f1 > ~/.src_list &
2) create a function in .bashrc:
findex() {
cat ~/.src_list | xargs grep "$*" 2>/dev/null
}
Then I can use below command to do the search:
findex "needle text"
HTH:)
I prefer xargs
find . -type f | xargs grep -I "needle text"
if your filenames are weird look up using the -0 options:
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -I "needle text"
bash example to serach text "eth0" in /etc in all text/ascii files
grep eth0 $(find /etc/ -type f -exec file {} \; | egrep -i "text|ascii" | cut -d ':' -f1)
If you are interested in finding any file type by their magic bytes using the awesome file utility combined with power of find, this can come in handy:
$ # Let's make some test files
$ mkdir ASCII-finder
$ cd ASCII-finder
$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=binary.file bs=1M count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB, 1.0 MiB) copied, 0.009023 s, 116 MB/s
$ file binary.file
binary.file: data
$ echo 123 > text.txt
$ # Let the magic begin
$ find -type f -print0 | \
xargs -0 -I ## bash -c 'file "$#" | grep ASCII &>/dev/null && echo "file is ASCII: $#"' -- ##
Output:
file is ASCII: ./text.txt
Legend: $ is the interactive shell prompt where we enter our commands
You can modify the part after && to call some other script or do some other stuff inline as well, i.e. if that file contains given string, cat the entire file or look for a secondary string in it.
Explanation:
find items that are files
Make xargs feed each item as a line into one liner bash
command/script
file checks type of file by magic byte, grep checks if ASCII
exists, if so, then after && your next command executes.
find prints results null separated, this is good to escape
filenames with spaces and meta-characters in it.
xargs , using -0 option, reads them null separated, -I ##
takes each record and uses as positional parameter/args to bash
script.
-- for bash ensures whatever comes after it is an argument even
if it starts with - like -c which could otherwise be interpreted
as bash option
If you need to find types other than ASCII, simply replace grep ASCII with other type, like grep "PDF document, version 1.4"
find . -type f | xargs file | grep "ASCII text" | awk -F: '{print $1}'
Use find command to list all files, use file command to verify they are text (not tar,key), finally use awk command to filter and print the result.
How about this
find . -type f|xargs grep "needle text"
How can i execute a certain command for every file/folder in the current folder?
I've started with this as a base script, but this seems that its only working when using temporary files, and i dont really like the ideea. Is there any other way?
FOLDER=".";
DIRS=`ls -1 "$FOLDER">/tmp/DIRS`;
echo >"/tmp/DIRS1";
while read line ; do
SIZE=`du "$FOLDER$line"`;
echo $SIZE>>"/tmp/DIRS1";
done < "/tmp/DIRS";
For anyone interested, i wanted to make a list of folders, sorted by their size. Here is the final result
FOLDER="$1";
for f in $FOLDER/*; do
du -sb "$f";
done | sort -n | sed "s#^[0-9]*##" | sed "s#^[^\./]*##" | xargs -L 1 du -sh | sed "s|$FOLDER||";
which leads to du -sb $FOLDER/* | sort -n | sed "s#^[0-9]*##" | sed "s#^[^\./]*##" | xargs -L 1 du -sh | sed "s|$FOLDER||";
Perhaps xargs, which reinvokes the command specified after it for each additional line of parameters received on stdin...
ls -1 $FOLDER | xargs du
But, in this case, why not...
du *
...? Or...
for X in *; do
du $X
done
(Personally, I use zsh, where you can modify the glob pattern to only find say regular files, or only directories, only symlinks etc - I'm pretty sure there's something similar in bash - can dig for details if you need that).
Am I missing part of your requirement?
The find command will let you execute a command for each item it finds, too. Without further arguments it will find all files and folders in the current directory, like this:
$ find -exec du -h {} \;
The {} part is the "variable" where the match is placed, here as the argument to du. \; ends the command.
It is useless to parse output of ls to cycle over files. Bash can do it with wildcard expansion.
Storing the result of du in a variable to output it to a file is also a useless use of a variable.
What I suggest:
for i in ./tmp/DIRS/*
do
du "$i" >> "/tmp/DIRS1"
done
What's wrong with something like this?
function process() {
echo "Processing $1"
}
for i in *
do
process $i
done
You can put all the "work" you want done inside the function process. This will do it for your current directory.
This works for every file in the current directory:
do
/usr/local/mp3unicode/bin/mp3unicode -s cp1251 --id3v2-encoding unicode "$file"
done
The invocation of action exec can be done by two ways:
find . -type d -exec du -ch {} \;
find . -type d -exec du -ch {} +
In the first command, the substitution {} occurs for each folder found. In the second one all the results of find are passed to exec at once, which matters, to obtain a final total.
https://www.eovao.com/en/a/bash%20find%20exec%20linux/2/bash-execute-action-on-find-(-exec)-for-each-file