Ubuntu - Copy Everything Except

If you want to copy everything within a directory, except certain files or directories, you can use the following command.

cp -a `ls | grep -v yourexcludepattern` ../destinationdir/

Assume, you want to copy all files, except *.java within from the current directory to the foo directory. Then, the command would be,

cp -a `ls | grep -v *.java` /home/wageesha/foo

How to copy a file into multiple directories in Ubuntu

Assume that you want to copy a file into multiple directories in the current directory, then all you have to do is, just entering following command in the terminal. Here, file.txt will be copied into all directories in the current directory. In case of a directory coping, replace file.txt with -rf [your dir].

for dir in *; do [ -d "$dir" ] && cp file.txt "$dir" ; done

for dir in *; do [ -d "$dir" ] && cp -rf /home/wageesha/images "$dir" ; done

Find and Replace using grep and sed

Following command finds all the occurences of <br> in all .xml files in the current directory, and replace those <br> with <br/> . Please note that < and > have been surrounded with [ and ] in the sed command. / in the <br/> tag has been escaped using \. If you want to replace foo with bar, then you can just use those words.

find . -iname "*.xml" | xargs grep -l "<br>" | xargs sed -i -e 's/[<]br[>]/<br\/>/g'

find . -iname "*.xml" | xargs grep -l "<br>" | xargs sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g'

A more general form of the expression would be

find . \( -name "*.php" -or -name "*.html" \) | xargs grep -l 'TEXT TO SEARCH' | xargs sed -i -e 's/TEXT TO REPLACE/REPLACEMENT STRING/g'

Rename Files with find command in linux

If you want to rename files recusivelly using linux find command, here are two example usage of it with exec and xargs. This command will convert all the *.xml files into *.html files.

Using xags

find . | xargs rename 's/\.xml$/\.html/i'

Using exec

find . -exec rename 's/\.xml$/\.html/i' {} +

Above commands recurrsively replace files within inner directories too. If you want to do it for current directory only you can use -prune.
i.e

find . -prune | xargs rename 's/\.xml$/\.html/i'

find . -prune -exec rename 's/\.xml$/\.html/i' {} +

find command - search content of a file

find in Unix is a very powerful tool for users which give you a very good flexibility. find command has a very broad usage among users. Here is the way how you can use find command to search files and content within files.

In order to search for a particular file named "test.txt" in /home directory, use

find /home -name "test.txt" -print

Search all the .txt files in /home directory, use

find /home -name "*.txt" -print

if you want to search for a string through all the files .txt files, there are two ways

find /home -name "*.txt" -exec grep -q "string-to-be-searched" '{}' \; -print

find /home -name "*.txt" | xargs grep "string-to-be-searched"

second one is more fast and efficient. Removal of -q in the first command will output the text segment where the specified string is. If you want to search all files for the string, just remove -name "*txt" option.