Bash

Delete all empty directories and all directories containing empty directories

 in Bash / GNU/Linux  tagged delete / empty / find by

Assuming you have a complex filesystem from which you want to delete all empty directories and all directories containing empty directories recursively, while leaving intact the rest.
You can use the following command.

find . -type d -empty -delete;

The configuration we used is the following:

  • -type d restricts the results to directories only
  • -empty restricts to empty directories only
  • -delete removes the directories that matched

The above code will delete all directories that are either empty or contain empty directories in the current directory.
It will successfully delete all empty directories even if they contain a large number of empty directories in any structure inside them.

Status of an executing dd 1

 in Bash  tagged dd / kill / pgrep / status / watch by

Recently, we were cloning a large hard disk on another using dd.
This operation took a really long time, at some point we got curious on what the status of the execution was.
Due to the minimal output dd offers, there was no indication for us whether the system was still copying and if it had a long way to go or not.

Fortunately, the developers of dd added a feature where sending a USR1 signal to a running dd process makes it print I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.

To achieve that we used a second terminal and followed these steps:

  1. We used pgrep to look up the running process based on its name and get the dd running process ID (PID): pgrep ^dd$ .
  2. We passed that PID to kill -USR1 which triggered the printing of the statistics on the terminal where dd was executing: kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$).

Solution

kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$);

Bonus

Additionally, we wanted to have dd statistics printed automatically every minute.
To achieve that, we used watch.  watch executes a program periodically, showing it’s output in full-screen.
We defined the interval in seconds using the parameter -n. (Please note that, the command will not allow less than 0.1 second interval.)

In the end, our command became as follows:

watch -n 60 kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)

The above command was sending a USR1 signal to dd via the kill application every minute (60 seconds) forcing it to print on standard output the I/O statistics.

Example

On terminal 1, we executed the command dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb;, which will copy disk sda over sdb.

On terminal 2, we executed the command kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$);, which forced dd to print I/O statistics back on terminal 1.

0+49728 records in
7218+0 records out
3695616 bytes (3.7 MB) copied, 2.85812 s, 1.3 MB/s
0+78673 records in
11443+0 records out
5858816 bytes (5.9 MB) copied, 4.49477 s, 1.3 MB/s
0+99003 records in
14386+0 records out
7365632 bytes (7.4 MB) copied, 5.75575 s, 1.3 MB/s
^C0+172104 records in
24918+0 records out
12758016 bytes (13 MB) copied, 10.197 s, 1.3 MB/s

Using .tgz files 1

 in Bash  tagged compress / create / extract / tar.gz / tgz by

Create

To create a .tgz file, we used tar with the following parameters -czf:

  • -c or --create will create a new archive.
  • -z– or --gzip or --gunzip or --ungzip will filter the archive through gzip and compress it.
  • -f or --file=ARCHIVE will use archive file or device ARCHIVE. If this option is not given, tar will first examine the environment variable TAPE. If it is set, its value will be used as the archive name. Otherwise, tar will assume the compiled-in default.

Example:


tar -czf $ARCHIVE_FILE_NAME.tgz $PATH_TO_COMPRESS;

Please note that the order of the parameters will not change the result.

Extract

To extract a .tgz or .tar.gz file using tar we used the following parameters -xzf:

  • -x or --extract --get will extract the files from the archive. Arguments are optional. When given, they specify names of the archive members to be extracted.
  • -z– or --gzip or --gunzip or --ungzip will filter the archive through gzip and decompress it.
  • -f or --file=ARCHIVE will use archive file or device ARCHIVE. If this option is not given, tar will first examine the environment variable TAPE. If it is set, its value will be used as the archive name. Otherwise, tar will assume the compiled-in default.

Example:


tar -xzf $ARCHIVE_FILE_NAME.tgz;

GNU/Linux find: Get results relative to the directory searching in, instead of directory shell is in

 in Bash  tagged find / relative / sub-shell by

Recently we wanted to create a list of files that could be found in a specific folder.
For that list we wanted the paths of the files to be relative to the folder we were searching in, instead of them being relative to the folder our shell was currently in.

To achieve that, we used cd to navigate into that folder and searched from there locally.
We used a sub-shell to achieve this, which was not needed, but because we did not want to change the current directory of our shell, it was needed.

The command was as follows:

(cd toThe/Path/WeAre/Interested/In && find .)

instead of:

find toThe/Path/WeAre/Interested/In

Since we were interested in getting all files, we did not put any filters on find.
Of course you can use find normally and modify it as you please.

Finally, since we wanted the list of files to be saved in a text file, we redirected the output of the above command to a file in the current working directory

(cd toThe/Path/WeAre/Interested/In && find .) > interestingFiles.txt