SLAC ESD Software Engineering Group
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
UNIX

Unix Tips 

SLAC Computing
Software Engineering
Detailed
Unix
 

This page gives some useful unix one-liners and tips


Two ways to look at the PATH (or CLASSPATH etc) with one item on each line:

echo $PATH | tr ":" "\n" | grep dev
printenv PATH | awk 'BEGIN {RS=":"} {print}'

To search for something in the path, e.g. all occurences of "dev":

printenv PATH | awk 'BEGIN {RS=":"} /dev/ {print}'

To give your xterm a title banner:

printf '\033]0; hi there \007' or printf "\033]0; `hostname` ENVS \007" 
(put this in a script, like printf "\033]0;$1\007" and run with the banner as the argument)
xterm -title "hi there"
(or specify title when you are starting the xterm)

Find all files in some directory and below, greater than some size:

find /u/cd/ronm -size +1000 -exec ls -l {} \;

Find all files older than some number of days (can be used in combination with size parameter above)

find /u/cd/ronm -mtime +30 -exec ls -l {} \;

Find all the files under a given file-system root which are also in a given directory. For instance, the following searches dirs under $CD_SOFT/ref/ for every file which was installed into $CD_SOFT/dev/include:

unalias ls
ls -1 $CD_SOFT/dev/include | xargs -I {} find $CD_SOFT/ref -name "{}" -print

Grep all the files in a directory ($CD_SOFT/ref/common/make) for occurances of filenames in another directory (ls):

unalias ls
ls -1 | xargs -I {} grep -i {} $CD_SOFT/ref/common/make/*

List the tree of files, except those in directories whose name matches given pattern(s), under a given directory. This example lists all the directories in our source tree (so it uses find's -follow to get symlinks), missing CVS and O.solaris directories:

find $CD_SOFT/src -follow \( -name "O.solaris" -o -name "CVS" \) -prune -o -print

List the tree of directories, except those whose name matches given pattern(s), under a given directory.

find $CD_SOFT/src -follow \( -name "CVS" -o -name "O.solaris" \) -prune -o -type d -print

Search a tree of directories, except those whose name matches given pattern(s), under a given directory, for files containing a given pattern. This example searches all files in all the directories in our source tree, for an occurance of "ENVS":

find $CD_SOFT/src -follow \( -name "CVS" -o -name "O.solaris" \) -prune -o -print | xargs egrep -i "ENVS"

Find all the directories in a tree that do not contain CVS directories (so are not "in" CVS). This example traverses the tree, not going into directories named CVS or O.*, and in the remaing ones, sees if there is a directory named CVS.

find . -follow \( -name "CVS" -o -name "O.*" \) -prune -o -type d -exec csh -c '(cd $1; if ( ! -e CVS ) echo `pwd` No cvs)' '{}' \;

Find something a  tree with a number of broken symbolic links or other errors, pipe stdout and stderr through egrep displaying all but error reports from find:

find . -name "solaris-sparc" -type d -follow |& egrep -v -e '^find:'

Search the jar files in a CLASSPATH for a given Java package name (or class name):

printenv CLASSPATH | tr : '\n' | grep -i .jar | xargs -tI {} jar -tf {} | grep javax.wsdl

Get the time of a file down to the second:

perl -e 'print localtime((stat("filename"))[9]) . "\n";'

To show processes with v.long commands, useful for java, use BSD ps -ww (see man page). On Solaris:

/usr/ucb/ps -auxww

Strip the CTRL-M (^M), ASCII octal 015, from line-endings from a file. This is useful when DOS (Microsoft Windows etc) origniated files are moved to Unix.

tr -d '\015' < filename > outputfilename

 

Useful Links

tar, gzip, gunzip, untar for archiving and compression. For help in taring and compressing files, and the converse (uncompressing followed by untaring), see the Wikipedia entry on tar.


[SLAC ESD Software Engineering Group][ SLAC Home Page]

Author: Greg White 24-Apr-2003
Modified by: Mike Laznovsky 29-Apr-2003, Terri Lahey 29-Apr-2003, Greg White 29-Apr-03 per Jingchen, Greg White 10-Sep-2003, Greg White 04-Nov-03 More find and xargs. 26-Nov-03, Greg White Get time of file to 1s. 15-Feb-05, Greg White. Added piping stdout |& stderr