Commands tagged links (7)

  • Find all the links to a file

    This command finds and prints all the symbolic and hard links to a file. Note that the file argument itself be a link and it will find the original file as well. You can also do this with the inode number for a file or directory by first using stat or ls or some other tool to get the number like so: stat -Lc %i file or ls -Hid file And then using: find -L / -inum INODE_NUMBER -exec ls -ld {} +


    17
    find -L / -samefile /path/to/file -exec ls -ld {} +
    eightmillion · 2011-04-27 06:14:15 8
  • Find status of all symlinks

    The symlinks command can show status of all symbolic links, including which links are dangling, which symlinks point to files on other file systems, which symlinks use ../ more than necessary, which symlinks are messy (e.g. having too many slashes or dots), etc. Other useful things it can do include removing all dangling links (-d) and converting absolute links to relative links (-c). The path given must be an absolute path (which is why I used $(pwd) in the example command).


    6
    symlinks -r $(pwd)
    kFiddle · 2009-05-01 23:33:10 10
  • Get International Space Station sighting information for your city

    This command outputs a table of sighting opportunities for the International Space Station. Find the URL for your city here: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/ Show Sample Output


    5
    links -dump "http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/view.cgi?country=United_States&region=Wisconsin&city=Portage" | sed -n '/--/,/--/p'
    eightmillion · 2011-05-03 12:15:56 7
  • Link a deep tree of files all into on directory

    If you want to pull all of the files from a tree that has mixed files and directories containing files, this will link them all into a single directory. Beware of filesystem files-per-directory limits.


    2
    find /deep/tree/ -type f -print0|xargs -0 -n1 -I{} ln -s '{}' .
    dinomite · 2010-12-21 13:00:33 6
  • Populate a folder with symbolic links to files listed in an m3u playlist.

    This command will place symbolic links to files listed in an m3u playlist into a specified folder. Useful for uploading playlists to Google Music. prefix = The full path prefix to file entries in your .m3u file, if the file paths are relative. For example, if you have "Music/folder/song.mp3" in your list.m3u, you might want to specify "/home/username" as your prefix. list.m3u = Path to the playlist target_folder = Path to the target folder in which you would like to create symlinks


    1
    (IFS=$'\n'; ln -sf $(awk '((NR % 2) != 0 && NR > 1) {print "prefix" $0}' list.m3u) target_folder)
    lxe · 2011-09-25 16:45:28 6
  • Print a list of all hardlinks in the working directory, recursively

    libpurple likes to hardlink files repeatedly. To ignore libpurple, use sed: | sed '/\.\/\.purple/d' Show Sample Output


    1
    find . -type f -a \! -links 1
    malathion · 2013-05-06 20:44:08 11
  • Convert all the symbolic links in $PWD to copies of the referenced files


    -2
    for FILE in `ls -1`; do if [ -L "$FILE" ]; then cp $(readlink "$FILE") ${FILE}_rf; rm -f $FILE; mv ${FILE}_rf "$FILE"; fi; done
    unixmonkey1907 · 2012-01-16 16:39:41 6

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands

Check These Out

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.

Use find to get around Argument list too long problem
Can be used for other commands as well, replace rm with ls. It is easy to make this shorter but if the filenames involved have spaces, you will need to do use find's "-print0" option in conjunction with xargs's "-0" option. Otherwise the shell that xargs uses to execute the "rm" command line will treat the space as a token separator, thereby treating the name as two (or more) names.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Clear current session history (bash)

Sort all running processes by their memory & CPU usage
you can also pipe it to "tail" command to show 10 most memory using processes.

Backup with versioning

BourneShell: Go to previous directory
cd - would return to the previous directory of your cd command. NB: previous dir is always stored in $OLDPWD variable.

Copy a file using dd and watch its progress
This is a more accurate way to watch the progress of a dd process. The $DDPID=$! is needed so that you don't get the PID of the sleep. The sleep 1 is needed because in my testing at least, if you run kill -USR1 against dd too quickly, it will kill it off instead of display the status. So you need to wait a second, probably so that it can configure itself to trap the USR1 signal.

Create arbitrary big file full of zeroes but done in a second
If you want to create fast a very big file for testing purposes and you do not care about its content, then you can use this command to create a file of arbitrary size within less than a second. Content of file will be all zero bytes. The trick is that the content is just not written to the disk, instead the space for it is somehow reserved on operating system level and file system level. It would be filled when first accessed/written (not sure about the mechanism that lies below, but it makes the file creation super fast). Instead of '1G' as in the example, you could use other modifiers like 200K for kilobytes (1024 bytes), 500M for megabytes (1024 * 1024 bytes), 20G for Gigabytes (1024*1024*1024 bytes), 30T for Terabytes (1024^4 bytes). Also P for Penta, etc... Command tested under Linux.

Convert all Flac in a directory to Mp3 using maximum quality variable bitrate

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: