linux

I ran into a situation this morning where I needed to use the Linux find command to (a) find all the MP3 files beneath my current directory and (b) copy them to another directory. In this case I didn't want to do a cp -r command or tar command to preserve the directory structure; instead, I wanted all of the files to end up in the same directory (so I could easily import them into iTunes).

Linux/Unix FAQ: Can you share some find command examples?

Sure. The Unix/Linux find command is very powerful. It can search the entire filesystem to find files and directories according to the search criteria you specify. Besides using the find command to locate files, you can also execute other Linux commands (grep, mv, rm, etc.) on the files and directories you find, which makes find extremely powerful. 

Summary: By keeping a history of the directories you've visited, the Teleport command is an improvement on the Unix/Linux cd command. By having a memory, Teleport lets you jump from one directory to any previously visited directory, easily.

A few quick notes:

Should you ever run into a situation where you want to use the Linux cut command by specifying both a field number and field delimiter, I hope this example is helpful for you.

I was just working on a problem where I wanted to list all the fonts on a Mac OS X (Unix) system, and needed to use the cut command this way. A straight listing of all the filenames in the Mac font directory gave me a long list of names like this:

If you ever need to debug a Unix or Linux shell script, you can just add the -x option to the interpreter when you invoke it. You can add the shell's debug option on the command line like this:

sh -x misbehaving_script.sh

or at the end of the first line in your shell script (the she-bang line), like this:

#!/bin/sh -x

I was just working on a shell script related to fonts on a Mac OS X (Unix), system, and when I tried to run it normally, all it gave me was this error message: