Useful Bash commands

This is a list of Bash commands that I frequently use with a short explanation. It may help you in everyday usage of your Unix based system. Tested on OS X but should also work on Ubuntu and others.

Listing files/folders sorted by time

When you need to find most recently edited file/folder in a directory this will be a useful command:

ls -t

Command details:

• ls List directory contents
• -t Sort by time modified (most recently modified first) before sorting the operands by lexicographical order

Rename files and folders recursively with find

The command is pretty simple:

find . -name some_name -execdir mv {} other_name \;

It will rename all some_name.* files and some_name directories to other_name recursively.

Command details:

• find Walks a file hierarchy
• . Path where to start searching for files
• -name some_name Name of the files and/or directories which will be renamed
• -execdir mv {} other_name \; Command to execute for each file found where:
• mv Move file
• {} Current file name
• other_name New file name
• \; Command termination

Rename multiple files inside folder with rename

For example changing a file extension in the current directory might look like this:

rename 's/.js/.jsx/g' *

Command details:

• rename Renames multiple files
• 's/.js/.jsx/g' Regexp which will be applied to the name of every file
• * Path for the modified files e.g. imports/client/components

List sizes of all folders inside a directory

This is very useful if you want to find largest directories:

du -sh *

Command details:

• du Display disk usage statistics
• -s Display a summary for each specified file. (Equivalent to -d 0)
• -h "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte.
• * Path for the files to list

NOTE: If you want to sort that list by size you may use:

du -sh * | sort -h

Where -h in sort referes to the:

-h --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

On OS X you will have to install coreutils package (it is as easy as typing brew install coreutils). If you don't use Homebrew you should definitely start using it. For Mac OS X the command will look as follows:

du -sh * | gsort -h