Linux Command Line Tools - Quick Tips

Following are some quick tips related to Linux Command Line Tools:

Using SED tool for replacing text in files

The following script can be used for updating all occurrences of a text inside files:

find folder_name -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/current_text/new_text/g'

Using SED tool for removing line that starts with some text in all files

The following script can be used for updating all occurrences of a text inside files:

find . -type f -exec sed -i '/^category:/ d' {} +

Using Rsync fore recursive file copy

To use Rsync for copying all mp3 files recursively from one folder to a single folder, use following command: rsync -avz ./..mp3 destination_folder/. The command should be issued from the source folder

Viewing number of files in directory

Use following command for fetching number of files in directory: ls | wc -l

Convert pdf files to text files

The pdftotext utility which is part of poplar-utils package allows converting pdf files to text files

Automate scp command using sshpass

To use the scp command non-interactively, for example in a script, we can use the sshpass utility. The following command can be used to copy a file to a remote server:

sshpass -p '{password}' scp {source_file_name} {remote_user}@{remote_server}:{remote_server_path}

Delete downloaded file using Wget

The delete-after command line option of wget is used to delete the downloaded file

Fetching website resource over https using wget

To fetch a website resource over https, we can use wget command. If the website’s https certificate is not trusted by wget, then we can use the —no-check-certificate switch with wget. For example:

wget https://example.com/path_to_resource --no-check-certificate

Monitoring user activity with acct package

The acct package provides tools for monitoring user activity. For Centos/Fedora this package is called psacct. For Debian based systems it is called acct One of the tools provided by the acct package is called sa. It prints a summary of the command executed by users Another tool called ac lists the total time for which users have been logged in

Split large files using split command in Linux

To split a large file into smaller files, we can use the split command that is part of most Linux distributions. For example the following command splits a file into smaller files of size 5 Mb: split large_file_name -b 5M; To combine the file parts back to the original file, we need to use the command: cat x > original_file_name*

Using Rsync over custom SSH port

Rsync can be used with custom SSH ports. For example to copy data from a remote server that is running SSH server over port 3000, the following command can be used:

rsync -avze "ssh -p 3000"  {user}@{server}:{remote_folder} {local_folder}

Setting file permissions with rsync

If we need to upload files to a remote server using rsync, and the files need to have certain ownership, then the chown option of rsync can be used. For example the following rsync command uploads the contents of the current folder to a remote server and sets the owner and group of the uploaded data to www-data:

rsync -avz * {remote_user}@{remote_server}/{remote_server_path} --chown=www-data:www-data

Rsync over SSH with key authentication

The following rsync command can be used to copy files on a remote server using SSH key authentication:

rsync --progress -avz -e "ssh -i {key_file_location}" \
remote-user@remote-server:remote-folder local-folder

Deleting files older than 1 year using Linux command line tools

If you want to recursively delete all files in a folder that were modified over 1 year ago, then the following command can be used:

find folder_path -type f -mtime +365 -ls -exec rm -f -- {} \;

Deleting empty folders recursively using Linux command line tools

If you want to recursively delete all folders within a given folder that are empty, then the following command may be used:

find . -type d -empty -delete

The following command can be used to recursively list all empty folders within a given folder:

find . -type d -empty

Renaming multiple files in folder with BASH

We often have a need to rename all files at once. For example we may need to add a certain text to all files within a folder. We can do this using a programming language. However the Bash programming language allows us to do this very easily using the rename command.

For example to add the text “_test” before the file extension to all mp3 files in a directory, we can use the following command:

rename -n 's/(.*)\.mp3/$1_test.mp3/' *.mp3.

This was suggested in an answer to the question Add text to end of the filename but before extension on StackOverflow.

Recursively change folder ownership

If you want to change the permissions of all folders under current directory to 755

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Appending text to end of file with Bash

To append text to the end of a file in Linux:

echo "Some new text" >> /tmp/file_name.txt