It seems I've got a problem. I've got some different file types in my current directory, and I want to just tar the .png files. I started with this:
find -name "*.png" | tar -cvf backupp.tar
It wouldn't work because I didn't specify which files, so looking on how others did it, I added xargs:
find -name "*.png" | xargs tar -cvf backupp.tar
It did work this time, and backupp.tar file was created, but here is the problem. I can't seem to extract it. Whenever I type:
tar -xvf backupp.tar
Nothings happens. I've tried changing chmod and sudo, but nothing gives in.
So, did I type the wrong command completely or is there somethings I just missed?
tar expects a list of names as arguments. Your use of xargs can be improved by adding the -print0 option to find and adding the -0 option to xargs to insure find is providing filenames separated by a nul-character and that xargs is processing a list of filenames separated by the same. This prevents any whitespace or other stray characters in the filenames from causing problems, e.g.
find dir -type f -name "*.png" -print0 | xargs -0 tar -cf tarfile.tar
The above will find all files in or below dir matching name "*.png" and provide a list of filenames separated by the nul-character to xargs for use by tar. You can list the files contained in the resulting archive with:
tar -tf tarfile.tar
Consider using compression (if wanted) by adding the z (gzipped) j (bzip2) or J (xz compression) and the appropriate extension to reduce you archive size. e.g.
... | xargs -0 tar -czf tarfile.tar.gz
I have a directory. It has about 500K .gz files.
How can I extract all .gz in that directory and delete the .gz files?
This should do it:
gunzip *.gz
#techedemic is correct but is missing '.' to mention the current directory, and this command go throught all subdirectories.
find . -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip '{}' \;
There's more than one way to do this obviously.
# This will find files recursively (you can limit it by using some 'find' parameters.
# see the man pages
# Final backslash required for exec example to work
find . -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip '{}' \;
# This will do it only in the current directory
for a in *.gz; do gunzip $a; done
I'm sure there's other ways as well, but this is probably the simplest.
And to remove it, just do a rm -rf *.gz in the applicable directory
Extract all gz files in current directory and its subdirectories:
find . -name "*.gz" | xargs gunzip
If you want to extract a single file use:
gunzip file.gz
It will extract the file and remove .gz file.
for foo in *.gz
do
tar xf "$foo"
rm "$foo"
done
Try:
ls -1 | grep -E "\.tar\.gz$" | xargs -n 1 tar xvfz
Then Try:
ls -1 | grep -E "\.tar\.gz$" | xargs -n 1 rm
This will untar all .tar.gz files in the current directory and then delete all the .tar.gz files. If you want an explanation, the "|" takes the stdout of the command before it, and uses that as the stdin of the command after it. Use "man command" w/o the quotes to figure out what those commands and arguments do. Or, you can research online.
I untarred something into a directory that already contained a lot of things. I wanted to untar into a separate directory instead. Now there are too many files to distinguish between. However the files that I have untarred have been created just now (right ?) and the original files haven’t been modified for long (at least a day). Is there a way to delete just these untarred files based on their creation information ?
Tar usually restores file timestamps, so filtering by time is not likely to work.
If you still have the tar file, you can use it to delete what you unpacked with something like:
tar tf file.tar --quoting-style=shell-always |xargs rm -i
The above will work in most cases, but not all (filenames that have a carriage return in them will break it), so be careful.
You could remove the directories by adding -r to that, but it's probably safer to just remove the toplevel directories manually.
find . -mtime -1 -type f | xargs rm
but test first with
find . -mtime -1 -type f | xargs echo
There are several different answers to this question in order of increasing complexity.
First, if this is a one off, and in this particular instance you are absolutely sure that there are no weird characters in your filenames (spaces are OK, but not tabs, newlines or other control characters, nor unicode characters) this will work:
tar -tf file.tar | egrep '^(\./)?[^/]+(/)?$' | egrep -v '^\./$' | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 rm -r
All that egrepping is to skip out on all the subdirectories of the subdirectories.
Another way to do this that works with funky filenames is this:
mkdir foodir
cd foodir
tar -xf ../file.tar
for file in *; do rm -rf ../"$file"; done
That will create a directory in which your archive has been expanded, but it sounds like you wanted that already anyway. It also will not handle any files who's names start with ..
To make that method work with files that start with ., do this:
mkdir foodir
cd foodir
tar -xf ../file.tar
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 sh -c 'for file in "$#"; do rm -rf ../"$file"; done' junk
Lastly, taking from Mat's answer, you can do this and it will work for any filename and not require you to untar the directory again:
tar -tf file.tar | egrep '^(\./)?[^/]+(/)?$' | grep -v '^\./$' | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 bash -c 'for fname in "$#"; do fname="$(echo -ne "$fname")"; echo -n "$fname"; echo -ne "\0"; done' junk | xargs -0 rm -r
You can handle files and directories in one pass with:
tar -tf ../test/bob.tar --quoting-style=shell-always | sed -e "s/^\(.*\/\)'$/rmdir \1'/; t; s/^\(.*\)$/rm \1/;" | sort | bash
You can see what is going to happen leave off the pipe to 'bash'
tar -tf ../test/bob.tar --quoting-style=shell-always | sed -e "s/^\(.*\/\)'$/rmdir \1'/; t; s/^\(.*\)$/rm \1/;" | sort
to handle filenames with linefeeds you need more processing.
I have a Textfile with one Filename per row:
Interpret 1 - Song 1.mp3
Interpret 2 - Song 2.mp3
...
(About 200 Filenames)
Now I want to search a Folder recursivly for this Filenames to get the full path for each Filename in Filenames.txt.
How to do this? :)
(Purpose: Copied files to my MP3-Player but some of them are broken and i want to recopy them all without spending hours of researching them out of my music folder)
The easiest way may be the following:
cat orig_filenames.txt | while read file ; do find /dest/directory -name "$file" ; done > output_file_with_paths
Much faster way is run the find command only once and use fgrep.
find . -type f -print0 | fgrep -zFf ./file_with_filenames.txt | xargs -0 -J % cp % /path/to/destdir
You can use a while read loop along with find:
filecopy.sh
#!/bin/bash
while read line
do
find . -iname "$line" -exec cp '{}' /where/to/put/your/files \;
done < list_of_files.txt
Where list_of_files.txt is the list of files line by line, and /where/to/put/your/files is the location you want to copy to. You can just run it like so in the directory:
$ bash filecopy.sh
+1 for #jm666 answer, but the -J option doesn't work for my flavor of xargs, so i chaned it to:
find . -type f -print0 | fgrep -zFf ./file_with_filenames.txt | xargs -0 -I{} cp "{}" /path/to/destdir/
I need to calculate a summary MD5 checksum for all files of a particular type (*.py for example) placed under a directory and all sub-directories.
What is the best way to do that?
The proposed solutions are very nice, but this is not exactly what I need. I'm looking for a solution to get a single summary checksum which will uniquely identify the directory as a whole - including content of all its subdirectories.
Create a tar archive file on the fly and pipe that to md5sum:
tar c dir | md5sum
This produces a single MD5 hash value that should be unique to your file and sub-directory setup. No files are created on disk.
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5sum {} + | awk '{print $1}' | sort | md5sum
The find command lists all the files that end in .py.
The MD5 hash value is computed for each .py file. AWK is used to pick off the MD5 hash values (ignoring the filenames, which may not be unique).
The MD5 hash values are sorted. The MD5 hash value of this sorted list is then returned.
I've tested this by copying a test directory:
rsync -a ~/pybin/ ~/pybin2/
I renamed some of the files in ~/pybin2.
The find...md5sum command returns the same output for both directories.
2bcf49a4d19ef9abd284311108d626f1 -
To take into account the file layout (paths), so the checksum changes if a file is renamed or moved, the command can be simplified:
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5sum {} + | md5sum
On macOS with md5:
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5 {} + | md5
ire_and_curses's suggestion of using tar c <dir> has some issues:
tar processes directory entries in the order which they are stored in the filesystem, and there is no way to change this order. This effectively can yield completely different results if you have the "same" directory on different places, and I know no way to fix this (tar cannot "sort" its input files in a particular order).
I usually care about whether groupid and ownerid numbers are the same, not necessarily whether the string representation of group/owner are the same. This is in line with what for example rsync -a --delete does: it synchronizes virtually everything (minus xattrs and acls), but it will sync owner and group based on their ID, not on string representation. So if you synced to a different system that doesn't necessarily have the same users/groups, you should add the --numeric-owner flag to tar
tar will include the filename of the directory you're checking itself, just something to be aware of.
As long as there is no fix for the first problem (or unless you're sure it does not affect you), I would not use this approach.
The proposed find-based solutions are also no good because they only include files, not directories, which becomes an issue if you the checksumming should keep in mind empty directories.
Finally, most suggested solutions don't sort consistently, because the collation might be different across systems.
This is the solution I came up with:
dir=<mydir>; (find "$dir" -type f -exec md5sum {} +; find "$dir" -type d) | LC_ALL=C sort | md5sum
Notes about this solution:
The LC_ALL=C is to ensure reliable sorting order across systems
This doesn't differentiate between a directory "named\nwithanewline" and two directories "named" and "withanewline", but the chance of that occurring seems very unlikely. One usually fixes this with a -print0 flag for find, but since there's other stuff going on here, I can only see solutions that would make the command more complicated than it's worth.
PS: one of my systems uses a limited busybox find which does not support -exec nor -print0 flags, and also it appends '/' to denote directories, while findutils find doesn't seem to, so for this machine I need to run:
dir=<mydir>; (find "$dir" -type f | while read f; do md5sum "$f"; done; find "$dir" -type d | sed 's#/$##') | LC_ALL=C sort | md5sum
Luckily, I have no files/directories with newlines in their names, so this is not an issue on that system.
If you only care about files and not empty directories, this works nicely:
find /path -type f | sort -u | xargs cat | md5sum
A solution which worked best for me:
find "$path" -type f -print0 | sort -z | xargs -r0 md5sum | md5sum
Reason why it worked best for me:
handles file names containing spaces
Ignores filesystem meta-data
Detects if file has been renamed
Issues with other answers:
Filesystem meta-data is not ignored for:
tar c - "$path" | md5sum
Does not handle file names containing spaces nor detects if file has been renamed:
find /path -type f | sort -u | xargs cat | md5sum
For the sake of completeness, there's md5deep(1); it's not directly applicable due to *.py filter requirement but should do fine together with find(1).
If you want one MD5 hash value spanning the whole directory, I would do something like
cat *.py | md5sum
Checksum all files, including both content and their filenames
grep -ar -e . /your/dir | md5sum | cut -c-32
Same as above, but only including *.py files
grep -ar -e . --include="*.py" /your/dir | md5sum | cut -c-32
You can also follow symlinks if you want
grep -aR -e . /your/dir | md5sum | cut -c-32
Other options you could consider using with grep
-s, --no-messages suppress error messages
-D, --devices=ACTION how to handle devices, FIFOs and sockets;
-Z, --null print 0 byte after FILE name
-U, --binary do not strip CR characters at EOL (MSDOS/Windows)
GNU find
find /path -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5sum "{}" +;
Technically you only need to run ls -lR *.py | md5sum. Unless you are worried about someone modifying the files and touching them back to their original dates and never changing the files' sizes, the output from ls should tell you if the file has changed. My unix-foo is weak so you might need some more command line parameters to get the create time and modification time to print. ls will also tell you if permissions on the files have changed (and I'm sure there are switches to turn that off if you don't care about that).
Using md5deep:
md5deep -r FOLDER | awk '{print $1}' | sort | md5sum
I want to add that if you are trying to do this for files/directories in a Git repository to track if they have changed, then this is the best approach:
git log -1 --format=format:%H --full-diff <file_or_dir_name>
And if it's not a Git directory/repository, then the answer by ire_and_curses is probably the best bet:
tar c <dir_name> | md5sum
However, please note that tar command will change the output hash if you run it in a different OS and stuff. If you want to be immune to that, this is the best approach, even though it doesn't look very elegant on first sight:
find <dir_name> -type f -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 md5sum | md5sum | awk '{ print $1 }'
md5sum worked fine for me, but I had issues with sort and sorting file names. So instead I sorted by md5sum result. I also needed to exclude some files in order to create comparable results.
find . -type f -print0 \
| xargs -r0 md5sum \
| grep -v ".env" \
| grep -v "vendor/autoload.php" \
| grep -v "vendor/composer/" \
| sort -d \
| md5sum
I had the same problem so I came up with this script that just lists the MD5 hash values of the files in the directory and if it finds a subdirectory it runs again from there, for this to happen the script has to be able to run through the current directory or from a subdirectory if said argument is passed in $1
#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
# loop in current dir
ls | while read line; do
ecriv=`pwd`"/"$line
if [ -f $ecriv ] ; then
md5sum "$ecriv"
elif [ -d $ecriv ] ; then
sh myScript "$line" # call this script again
fi
done
else # if a directory is specified in argument $1
ls "$1" | while read line; do
ecriv=`pwd`"/$1/"$line
if [ -f $ecriv ] ; then
md5sum "$ecriv"
elif [ -d $ecriv ] ; then
sh myScript "$line"
fi
done
fi
If you want really independence from the file system attributes and from the bit-level differences of some tar versions, you could use cpio:
cpio -i -e theDirname | md5sum
There are two more solutions:
Create:
du -csxb /path | md5sum > file
ls -alR -I dev -I run -I sys -I tmp -I proc /path | md5sum > /tmp/file
Check:
du -csxb /path | md5sum -c file
ls -alR -I dev -I run -I sys -I tmp -I proc /path | md5sum -c /tmp/file