Delete all but some directories

I think, like me, you would have faced a lot of situations, where you wanted to delete all the files or directories in a location, leaving only the required files/directories. So, I have a directory containing lots of files/directories and I want to delete most of them except some 5/10 of them, how to I do it.

I finally wrote a small script to do that. First save list of files that you do not want to delete in file called “listnames” and then execute the below script. This will give you the rm commands that you need to execute. If you want you can execute the rm command from the script, but to be able to review, I just have the commands echoed.

create text tables from delimited files.

To create simple text tables to paste in emails or to use in any other document where you want to show a table, here is something that you can use. There is a perl module which provides “tablify“. And here is how to use it:

sudo yum install perl-Text-RecordParser

This will install a command “tablify” that you can use in number of ways. Here is a simple example to use it. You can read the man pages to see how you can use it.

convert tabs to spaces, the easy way

Lots of times you want to convert tabs to spaces and sometimes from a shell script, if that is the case, then simple solution is “tidy“. First you need to install tidy as follows:

sudo yum install tidy

and then you can use the command tab2space.

tab2spcae

This will print the output to STDOUT by default which you can redirect if you want.

poor mans watch, watch for solaris

Here is a simple script that you can use as watch in Solaris as well.

watch()
{
    #Poor man's watch
    while (true)
    do
        clear
        $*
        sleep 2;
    done
}

Disable a few cores when you want to save power.

If you have a lot of CPU power and working on battery. If you do not need that much of power and would like to rather save some battery power by disabling some cpus then you can use the below script. This script disables cpus from 4 to 7. You can change the number in the for loop. You would need the sudo to be setup or remove sudo and run the script as root. The script will show you the currently active cpu’s before and after disabling the CPU’s.

quick bash script for datewise backup of directory

I was working on something and the data was very critical and needed backup. I wrote a bash script to back up the data every 5 hours with cron and bash script. Thought I will share that with you. Here is the script.

#!/bin/bash - 
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE:  backup.sh
# 
#         USAGE:  ./backup.sh 
# 
#   DESCRIPTION:  Backup all the current files.
# 
#       OPTIONS:  ---
#  REQUIREMENTS:  ---
#          BUGS:  ---
#         NOTES:  ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), amit.agarwal@roamware.com
#       COMPANY: Roamware India Pvt Ltd
#       CREATED: 08/19/2011 02:43:32 PM IST
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================
backupf=( a b c d) #Here you need to specify the directory you need to backup.
bkupdir="/tmp/backup/$(date +%Y)/$(date +%m)/$(date +%d)" #Here you can change the basedir for the backups
mkdir  -p $bkupdir
sudo tar cvfz $bkupdir/bkup_$(date "+%Y%m%d_%H%M").tgz $backupf[*] #Remove sudo if you do not need it.
echo "Backup created in dir $dir"

And then just add it to cron as “00 */5 * * * /home//bin/backup.sh”. Change the path if it does not match what is given here.

Ignore CVS and svn directories in bash autocompletion.

CVS and SVN directories are something that really cause lot of un-necessary nuisance. So, simple solution just ignore them 🙂

export FIGNORE=CVS:~:.o:.svn
bind 'set match-hidden-files off'

Related articles

• How to use TortoiseSVN to get files that under a specific version(stackoverflow.com)

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