linux

Bulk edit filenames using shell

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Unix/linux command to remove specific matching text from all files. In this case, I had a list of tiles that had -defaults.properties suffix. I wanted to rename them all so that they had just .properties suffix instead. For example, if a file was named connection-defaults.properties, I wanted it to be renamed to connection.properties. 

As usual, rather than wasting my time and doing it manually 100 times, I set myself to find an automated way of doing it. And sure enough, I found it!

Here it is:

The above command finds all files that end with -defaults.properties. For each file that match that criteria, we then rename it to a name that has -defaults stripped out. To strip out the name, we use sed command and to rename we use mv command.

Tested on mac running oh-my-zsh.

Useful unix file editing commands

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Find and replace text matching a regular expression in a single file

The above command searches for the (something\-[\da-zA-Z]+) regular expression and replaces it whole (because of the parenthesis which means to select the text matching the expression within) with ToReplace. The g in the end indicates that the operation will be applied to all matches in the file as supplied in path/to/file.txt argument. The -i parameter along with '' suggests the sed command to perform the edit on the file itself, without creating a new copy.

Find and replace text matching a regular expression in files matching name

The above command finds file within /base/directory whose names match *.txt format. Later we combine the output of this with xargs which appends each line of output (path to each matching file) to the following sed command. The -n 1 argument to the xargs command tells it to supply each line of argument one by one to the sed command.

Find and replace text matching a regular expression in files whose contents match a regular expression

In the above command we use the basic find command to get a list of files that we want to do the search in. Then we use grep to recursively find in those files. Now in the above command we don’t really need the -r flag for grep because the find command will list full paths to those files, but we would need it if we were doing find on a relative path instead (like .). The -l flag for grep here will only list the paths to the files that it found having the content TextToFindInFiles and not the actual matching contents like it usually prints. This list of the files is then outputted to the xargs command which then subsequently runs the sed command.

 

Finding classes in jar/war files

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Recently I was out looking for classes that were present in my Web Application Archive (WAR) file. Why? Well, I was out combating Jar Hell. As I am allergic to doing things manually, here’s a small command I constructed to help me find classes within jar files:

The above command prints out class file as well as the name of the jar file that class is present in. If you’re looking just for the path where the classes are present, you can just run:

 

Update all pom versions at once using maven versions

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Most of the projects I work on are multi-module projects so updating versions of pom files manually is a bit pain. As always, here’s a command you can run that will update all pom versions in one go:

Make sure all your modules are discoverable. You can do this by enabling all your profiles in case some of your sub-modules are not visible from the main pom.

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5726412

Finding biggest files and folders on Linux/Unix systems

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I was happily doing some builds on my Jenkins slave server at home and then suddenly boom! it broke. It took all the queued up builds with it because they all started failing. When I looked, it was a disk space issue.

Normally my builds don’t take up much disk space so I started investigating. I needed to find files that were occupying largest size on the disk. After some trial and error, following command came to rescue:

This was great, but then I wanted to find folders that were the biggest. No problem!

Notice the -type d above which differentiates it from the first command. Also note that the above command outputting the disk use by folder also includes subfolders, so generally the largest ones will be the top level folders and as you go up the list (its ascending in order by default) you’ll find the subfolders with their sizes. You can always pipe the whole thing through grep to only look for the folders you want like so:

While this is great and all, sometimes you just want to go upto certain depth within the file tree. Say no more!

Notice the -maxdepth 2 flag which sets the max depth to 2.

However, you could be one of those people who don’t like the find command at all. Maybe a past feud, or just a dislike. Well, the du command has your back!

The -m flag makes it print file sizes in megabytes, -d 2 sets max depth to 2 and --all tells it to work with files as well as directories. Its actually quite comprehensive because using some clever flags like -I to provide a mask for files and directories to ignore and -L to follow symbolic links (they are not followed by default) you can get quite a lot out of it. Also, a quick note before ending this post, you can switch the file size block from -m for megabytes (example above) to -g for gigabytes or even -k for kilobytes. You can use -h for human readable where it will automatically choose the closest block size but this will confuse the sort because it doesn’t quite take the size character in account and only sorts things using the numeric values.

Above commands have been tested on mac where they were installed as part of GNU CoreUtils homebrew package.