Tuesday, May 18, 2010

delete all empty files in a directory

Automatically generating files? Annoyed at all the empty ones? Here's how to purge them:


> for file in $( ls . ); do if [ ! -s $file ]; then rm -f $file; fi; done


Of course you could just get over your fear of find and take a look at that man page. Perfect for a recursive search and delete all in one:


> find . -empty -delete


simple, no?

Friday, May 14, 2010

escaping quotes in bash variables

I often need to escape quotation characters or other special characters that are being piped into a bash process:

Say you have a mysql table which contains protein names. Some of these have the ' character in them (e.g. "Inosine 5' monophosphate dehydrogenase") and you want to do some bulk processing on these names, you could do something like this:


> mysql -u paulbo -N <<< "SELECT name from proteins" | while read protein_name; do mysql -u paulbo -N "SELECT count(*) FROM data INNER JOIN proteins ON data.protein_id = proteins.protein_id where proteins.name = '${protein_name//\'/\\\'}'"; done


Ah, three backslashes. Why didn't I think of that?

And sometimes you just want to output the text with the special characters all converted into something a bit more amenable (like the old and trusted '_').


> mysql -u paulbo -N <<< "SELECT name from proteins" | while read protein_name; do echo ${protein_name//[-\/\:\'\"\(\) ]/_};done

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Excluding certain files from a directory listing

Ok, well, this will be obvious to anyone who's really read the ls man page, but I only came across it a couple of days ago.

Say you have a directory with tons of files in it mostly with a single extension and you want to see what else is in there. Sure, you can use grep, but you can also use ls's inbuilt flat --hide.


> ls -l
arg.txt
blarg.txt
foo.txt
...
interesting.sh
... # and a ton more *.txt files
zlargyblorg.txt
> ls -l --hide=*.txt
interesting.sh
hidden.csv


Isn't that useful?