Storage

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Storage

See also *nix#Devices

Virtualization

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_disk - a device that provides an area of usable storage capacity on one or more physical disk drive components in a computer system. Other terms that are used to mean the same thing are partition, logical volume, and in some cases a virtual disk (vdisk).

LVM

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_volume_management - provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe together or otherwise combine partitions into larger virtual ones that administrators can re-size or move, potentially without interrupting system use. Volume management represents just one of many forms of storage virtualization; its implementation takes place in a layer in the device-driver stack of an OS (as opposed to within storage devices or in a network).
  • LVM2 - refers to the userspace toolset that provide logical volume management facilities on linux. It is reasonably backwards-compatible with the original LVM toolset.



  • Volume group - the highest level abstraction used within the Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It gathers together a collection of Logical Volumes (LV) and Physical Volumes (PV) into one administrative unit.



  • Kvpm - KDE Volume and Partition Manager is a GUI front end for Linux LVM and Gnu parted. LVM2 groups and volumes can be created, removed and manipulated using most of the options supported by the standard LVM2 tools. Some support for creating and operating on partitions is also provided. It also handles creating and mounting file systems.


RAID

See also Hardware#RAID



Snapper

  • Snapper - a tool for Linux filesystem snapshot management. Apart from the obvious creation and deletion of snapshots, it can compare snapshots and revert differences between snapshots. In simple terms, this allows root and non-root users to view older versions of files and revert changes. The features include: Manually create snapshots, Automatically create snapshots, e.g. with YaST and zypp, Automatically create timeline of snapshots, Show and revert changes between snapshots, Works with btrfs, ext4 and thin-provisioned LVM volumes, Supports Access Control Lists and Extended Attributes, Automatic cleanup of old snapshots, Command line interface, D-Bus interface, PAM module to create snapshots during login and logout.

Partitions

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_table - a table maintained on disk by the operating system describing the partitions on that disk. The terms partition table and partition map are most commonly associated with the MBR partition table of a Master Boot Record (MBR) in IBM PC compatibles, but it may be used generically to refer to other "formats" that divide a disk drive into partitions, such as: GUID Partition Table (GPT), Apple partition map (APM), or BSD disklabel.


  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record - a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond. The concept of MBRs was publicly introduced in 1983 with PC DOS 2.0.

The MBR holds the information on how the partitions, containing file systems, are organized on that medium. The MBR also contains executable code to function as a loader for the installed operating system—usually by passing control over to the loader's second stage, or in conjunction with each partition's volume boot record (VBR). This MBR code is usually referred to as a boot loader.



  • GNU Parted manipulates partition tables. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data on hard disks and disk imaging. The package contains a library, libparted, as well as well as a command-line frontend, parted, which can also be used in scripts.
  • gnome-disks

Cache

Loopback

  • https://www.mankier.com/4/loop - The loop device is a block device that maps its data blocks not to a physical device such as a hard disk or optical disk drive, but to the blocks of a regular file in a filesystem or to another block device. This can be useful for example to provide a block device for a filesystem image stored in a file, so that it can be mounted with the mount(8) command.
  • losetup - set up and control loop devices

Network

  • xNBD is yet another NBD (Network Block Device) server program, which works with the NBD client driver of Linux Kernel.

Utils

Repair

File systems

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_file_system - or virtual filesystem switch is an abstraction layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS can, for example, be used to access local and network storage devices transparently without the client application noticing the difference. It can be used to bridge the differences in Windows, Mac OS and Unix filesystems, so that applications can access files on local file systems of those types without having to know what type of file system they are accessing.
  • wipefs - wipe a filesystem signature from a device

/etc/fstab

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fstab - or file systems table, a system configuration file commonly found on Unix systems. On Linux, it is part of the util-linux package. The fstab file typically lists all available disks and disk partitions, and indicates how they are to be initialized or otherwise integrated into the overall system's file system. fstab is still used for basic system configuration, notably of a system's main hard drive and startup file system, but for other uses has been superseded in recent years by automatic mounting. The fstab file is most commonly used by the mount command, which reads the fstab file to determine which options should be used when mounting the specified device.

Formatting

sudo fdisk -l

sudo umount /dev/sdc1

# FAT
sudo mkfs.vfat -n 'device name' -I /dev/sdc1

# NTFS
sudo mkfs.ntfs -I /dev/sdc1

# EXT4
sudo mkfs.ext4 -n  -I /dev/sdc1

Swap

swapon -s
  # equivelant to cat /proc/swaps
free -m
  # shows memory used

Ext2/3/4

kjournald is responsible for the journal of ext3 [4]



  • https://github.com/gerard/ext4fuse - a read-only implementation of ext4 for FUSE. The main reason this exists is to be able to read linux partitions from OSX. However, it should work on top of any FUSE implementation. Linux and FreeBSD have been tested to some point and I've heard that OpenSolaris should also work.

ZFS

"FreeBSD ZFS tuning guide wiki indicates you'll need about 5GB of ram per 1TB of saved disk space"

Btrfs

See also Backup#Btrfs

General

Subvolumes appear like directories. inode is different.

"Btrfs support is included in the linux package (as a module). Needs a reboot after installing before btrfs recognised. User space utilities are available in btrfs-progs. For multi-devices support (RAID like feature of btrfs) aka btrfs volume in early boot, you have to enable btrfs mkinitcpio hook (provided by mkinitcpio package) to be able to use, for example, a root btrfs volume. If the btrfs volume is a non-system volume, one only needs to set USEBTRFS="yes" in /etc/rc.conf. However, if you only use bare btrfs partition, such options are not needed."

"The btrfs scrub command reads redundant data and validates all the checksums, correcting any errors it finds along the way, using the checksum to determine which copy is the valid one. But with a single drive, how can it correct anything? The metadata - the file system overhead that is used to manage your data - is always stored in a redundant manner by default, even on a single drive. As a result, any corrupted metadata can be corrected, on the fly."

"EXT4 checksums its journal, which AFAIK will protect against errors caused by sync failures (ie. power failure during disk I/O). But it’s not going to protect against latent sector errors. To do that, you need checksumming on all the file data, along the lines of what ZFS or BTRFS provides."

A cross-subvolume copy patch has made it into 3.6_rc. This patch will allow cp --reflink across subvolumes, as long as the copy does not cross mount points.

copy-on-write, without the ram requirement of zsf snapshots every 30 seconds, ability to mount from previous gen

Commands

mkfs.btrfs -L [label] /dev/[device]
mount -t btrfs /dev/sdg /mnt/drivename


btrfs device add /dev/sdc /mnt/btrfs


btrfs filesystem df /media/drivename

btrfs filesystem show
btrfs filesystem defragment /


btrfs-debug-tree -R /dev/sdg
  show drive/subvolume infos, unmounted
btrfs subvolume create [<dest>/]

btrfs subvolume snapshot /mnt/btrfs /mnt/btrfs/snapshot_of_root

btrfs subvolume delete [<dest>/]


Cloning a file between subvolumes;

cp --reflink /mnt/MYFILES/myfile1 /mnt/MYFILES/myfile3


mount -t btrfs -o compress=lzo /dev/sdg /mnt/drivename


In a nutshell, you should look at:

  • btrfs scrub to detect issues on live filesystems
  • look at btrfs detected errors in syslog
  • mount -o ro,recovery to mount a filesystem with issues
  • btrfs-zero-log might help in specific cases.
  • btrfs restore will help you copy data off a broken btrfs filesystem.
  • btrfs check --repair, aka btrfsck is your last option if the ones above have not worked.
btrfs-scrub [options] <device>
  # scrub btrfs filesystem, verify block checksums


Tools

  • btrfs-gui is a graphical user interface tool for inspecting and managing btrfs filesystems. It is capable of managing filesystems on the local machine, and filesystems on remote network-accessible machines. It requires root access to the machine to perform most of its tasks (but separates the root-access part from the GUI).

Articles

XFS

bcachefs

F2FS

FAT

FAT is a family of filesystems, comprising at least, in chronological order:

  • FAT12, a filesystem used on floppies since the late 1980s, in particular by MS-DOS;
  • FAT16, a small modification of FAT12 supporting larger media, introduced to support hard disks;
  • vFAT, which is backward compatible with FAT, but allows files to have longer names which only vFAT-aware applications running on vFAT-aware operating systems can see;
  • FAT32, another modification of FAT16 designed to support larger disk sizes. In practice FAT32 is almost always used with vFAT long file name support, but technically 16/32 and long-file-names-yes/no are independent.

Because those filesystems are very similar, they're usually handled by the same drivers and tools. mkfs.vfat and mkfs.fat are the same tool; an empty * FAT16 filesystem and an empty vFAT filesystem look exactly the same, so mkfs doesn't need to distinguish between them. (You can think of FAT16 and vFAT as two different ways of seeing the same filesystem rather than two separate filesystem formats.) [14]

exFAT

NTFS

APFS

Clustered / parallel

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustered_file_system - a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system (only direct attached storage for each node). Clustered file systems can provide features like location-independent addressing and redundancy which improve reliability or reduce the complexity of the other parts of the cluster. Parallel file systems are a type of clustered file system that spread data across multiple storage nodes, usually for redundancy or performance.


OrangeFS

Distributed

Ceph

  • Ceph is a free software distributed file system. Ceph's main goals are to be POSIX-compatible, and completely distributed without a single point of failure. The data is seamlessly replicated, making it fault tolerant. Clients mount the file system using a Linux kernel client. On March 19, 2010, Linus Torvalds merged the Ceph client for Linux kernel 2.6.34 which was released on May 16, 2010. An older FUSE-based client is also available. The servers run as regular Unix daemons.

Other

  • Opendedup Develops SDFS, a file-system that does inline deduplication.

Repair

Squashfs

  • Squashfs - a compressed read-only filesystem for Linux. Squashfs is intended for general read-only filesystem use, for archival use (i.e. in cases where a .tar.gz file may be used), and in constrained block device/memory systems (e.g. embedded systems) where low overhead is needed.

Image files

Tools




Union mount

UnionFS

aufs

Overlayfs


mhddfs

autofs

Quotas

Encryption


LUKS

EncFS

securefs

  • https://github.com/netheril96/securefs - securefs is a filesystem in userspace (FUSE) that transparently encrypts and authenticates data stored. It is particularly designed to secure data stored in the cloud. securefs mounts a regular directory onto a mount point. The mount point appears as a regular filesystem, where one can read/write/create files, directories and symbolic links. The underlying directory will be automatically updated to contain the encrypted and authenticated contents.

eCrypt

TrueCrypt

Rubberhose

Emulation

Files & directories

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_(computing) - a file system cataloging structure which contains references to other computer files, and possibly other directories. On many computers, directories are known as folders, or drawers to provide some relevancy to a workbench or the traditional office file cabinet. Files are organized by storing related files in the same directory. In a hierarchical filesystem (that is, one in which files and directories are organized in a manner that resembles a tree), a directory contained inside another directory is called a subdirectory. The terms parent and child are often used to describe the relationship between a subdirectory and the directory in which it is cataloged, the latter being the parent. The top-most directory in such a filesystem, which does not have a parent of its own, is called the root directory.


  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_file_types - For normal files in the file system, Unix does not impose or provide any internal file structure. This implies that from the point of view of the operating system, there is only one file type. The structure and interpretation thereof is entirely dependent on how the file is interpreted by software. Unix does however have some special files. These special files can be identified by the ls -l command which displays the type of the file in the first alphabetic letter of the file system permissions field. A normal (regular) file is indicated by a hyphen-minus '-'.


  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_descriptor - In the traditional implementation of Unix, file descriptors index into a per-process file descriptor table maintained by the kernel, that in turn indexes into a system-wide table of files opened by all processes, called the file table. This table records the mode with which the file (or other resource) has been opened: for reading, writing, appending, reading and writing, and possibly other modes. It also indexes into a third table called the inode table that describes the actual underlying files. To perform input or output, the process passes the file descriptor to the kernel through a system call, and the kernel will access the file on behalf of the process. The process does not have direct access to the file or inode tables.

On Linux, the set of file descriptors open in a process can be accessed under the path /proc/PID/fd/, where PID is the process identifier. In Unix-like systems, file descriptors can refer to any Unix file type named in a file system. As well as regular files, this includes directories, block and character devices (also called "special files"), Unix domain sockets, and named pipes. File descriptors can also refer to other objects that do not normally exist in the file system, such as anonymous pipes and network sockets.

The FILE data structure in the C standard I/O library usually includes a low level file descriptor for the object in question on Unix-like systems. The overall data structure provides additional abstraction and is instead known as a file handle.





Storage devices

Block and partition names;

sd[a,b,etc]
  drive

sda[1,2,etc]
  partition of drive
cat /proc/partitions

blkid
  # block device id (uuid, etc.) info

File system mounts

lsblk
  # list information about block devices.
findmnt
df -a
mounts
mount -l
mount
mount /dev/sdxY /some/directory

umount /some/directory

mount -o remount /
  remount partition after /etc/fstab change
mount -o loop example.img /home/you/dir
pmount
  • https://linux.die.net/man/1/pmount - ("policy mount") is a wrapper around the standard mount program which permits normal users to mount removable devices without a matching /etc/fstab entry.
systemd-mount
systemd-mount /dev/sdb1
  # mounts to automatic mount point based on label


Directory structure

See LSB, etc.





  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard - defines the directory structure and directory contents in Unix[citation needed] and Unix-like operating systems. It is maintained by the Linux Foundation. The latest version is 3.0, released on 3 June 2015.[1] Currently it is only used by Linux distributions.




  • rmshit - Keep $HOME or other dir clean from unwanted tempfiles, configs and other crap you'll never use that's autocreated upon execution of bad behaving applications
  • BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean a thousand applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster.


Copying

See also Sharing, Backup

cp

cp - copy files and directories
cp [option]… [-T] source dest


cp target --parents a/b/c existing_dir
  1. copies the file `a/b/c' to `existing_dir/a/b/c', creating any missing intermediate directories. [24]


scp

scp -P 2264 foobar.txt your_username@remotehost.edu:/some/remote/directory
scp -rP 2264 folder your_username@remotehost.edu:/some/remote/directory
  • dcp is a distributed file copy program that automatically distributes and dynamically balances work equally across nodes in a large distributed system without centralized state. http://filecopy.org/

dd

  • dd - Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the options.
    • dd is a common Unix program whose primary purpose is the low-level copying and conversion of raw data.


if stands for input file and of for output file.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/backup.img
  create a backup

dd if=/mnt/sdb1/backup.img of=/dev/sda
  restore a backup

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc
  clone a drive

dd if=/dev/sdb | ssh root@target "(cat >backup.img)"
  backup over network

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=cdimage.iso
  backup a cd
dd if=/dev/sr0 of=myCD.iso bs=2048 conv=noerror,sync
  create an ISO disk image from a CD-ROM.

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2 bs=4096 conv=noerror
  Clone one partition to another

dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad1 bs=1M conv=noerror
  Clone a hard disk "ad0" to "ad1".

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1000000 of=file_1GB

dd if=file_1GB of=/dev/null bs=64k
  drive benchmark test and analyze the sequential read and write performance for 1024 byte blocks

Storage device space

du (disk usage)

du -sh
  size of a folder
du -S
  size of files in a folder

du -aB1m|awk '$1 >= 100'
  everything over 100Mb
cd / | sudo du -khs *
  show root folder size

sudo du -a --max-depth=1 /usr/lib | sort -n -r | head -n 20
  size of program folders /usr/lib

du -sk ./* | sort -nr | awk 'BEGIN{ pref[1]="K"; pref[2]="M"; pref[3]="G";} { total = total + $1;
x = $1; y = 1;  while( x > 1024 ) { x = (x + 1023)/1024; y++; }
printf("%g%s\t%s\n",int(x*10)/10,pref[y],$2); } END { y = 1; while( total > 1024 )
{ total = (total + 1023)/1024; y++; } printf("Total: %g%s\n",int(total*10)/10,pref[y]); }'

df

df -h
  human readable

di

  • di is a disk information utility, displaying everything (and more) that your 'df' command does. It features the ability to display your disk usage in whatever format you prefer. It also checks the user and group quotas, so that the user sees the space available for their use, not the system wide disk space.

du

  • du - Summarize disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories.

cdu

  • [27] cdu (for Color du) is a perl script which call du and display a pretty histogram with optional colors which allow to imediatly see the directories which take disk space.

dfc

ncdu

  • ncdu - ncurses disk usage
ncdu / --exclude /home --exclude /media --exclude /run/media
  check everything apart from home and external drives

ncdu / --exclude /home --exclude /media --exclude /run/media
  check everything apart from external drives
ncdu / --exclude /home --exclude /media --exclude /run/media --exclude /boot
--exclude /tmp --exclude /dev --exclude /proc
  just the root partition

Baobab

Other

  • https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat - a graphical application to show where your disk space has gone and to help you to clean it up. This is a Qt-only port of the old Qt3/KDE3-based KDirStat, now based on the latest Qt 5. It does not need any KDE libs or infrastructure. It runs on every X11-based desktop on Linux, BSD and other Unix-like systems.
  • Filelight creates an interactive map of concentric, segmented rings that help visualise disk usage on your computer.

File information

ls

ls
  list in row
ls -l
  long list

ls *
  files in directory and immediate subdiretories

just names;

ls -m1
  -m fill width with a comma separated list of entries ??
ls --format single-column
  column of names only
ls -l | grep - | awk '{print $9}'
  using awk to show the 9th word (name). strips colour.
ls -l | cut -f9 -s -d" "
  using cut to cut from the 9th word, using space as a delimiter. strips colour.
ls | cat
  neat

ls -a
  show hidden files
ls  -A
  show hidden files, exclude . and ..

stat

stat .
  display file or file system status
stat -c "%n %a" * | column -t
  directory files + octal

chattr/lsattr

lsattr .

append only (a), compressed (c), no dump (d), immutable (i), data journaling (j), secure deletion (s), no tail-merging (t), undeletable (u), no atime updates (A), synchronous directory updates (D), synchronous updates (S), and top of directory hierarchy (T).

file

file

Directory navigation

pwd

cd

cd change/directory/path

Other

v def conf       =>     vim /some/awkward/path/to/type/default.conf
j abc            =>     cd /hell/of/a/awkward/path/to/get/to/abcdef
m movie          =>     mplayer /whatever/whatever/whatever/awesome_movie.mp4
o eng paper      =>     xdg-open /you/dont/remember/where/english_paper.pdf
vim `f rc lo`    =>     vim /etc/rc.local
vim `f rc conf`  =>     vim /etc/rc.conf

alias defaults;

alias a='fasd -a'        # any
alias s='fasd -si'       # show / search / select
alias d='fasd -d'        # directory
alias f='fasd -f'        # file
alias sd='fasd -sid'     # interactive directory selection
alias sf='fasd -sif'     # interactive file selection
alias z='fasd_cd -d'     # cd, same functionality as j in autojump
alias zz='fasd_cd -d -i' # cd with interactive selection
  • Desk - Lightweight workspace manager for the shell. Desk makes it easy to flip back and forth between different project contexts in your favorite shell. [33]

Creating files

touch

touch filename
  create a file or update timestamp

mkdir

mkdir directory
mkdir directory -p
  no error if existing, make parent directories as needed

ln

symlink

ln -s {target-filename}
ln -s {target-filename} {symbolic-filename}
  create soft link

fallocate

  • fallocate - used to manipulate the allocated disk space for a file, either to deallocate or preallocate it. For filesystems which support the fallocate system call, preallocation is done quickly by allocating blocks and marking them as uninitialized, requiring no IO to the data blocks. This is much faster than creating a file by filling it with zeroes. The exit code returned by fallocate is 0 on success and 1 on failure.

Test files

yes abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789 > largefile
  # about 10 times faster than running dd if=/dev/urandom of=largefile, about as fast as using dd if=/dev/zero of=filename bs=1M. [34]

Editing files

See Vim, Emacs

echo "hello" >> greetings.txt

cat temp.txt >> data.txt
  To append the contents of the file temp.txt to file data.txt

date >> dates.txt
  To append the current date/time timestamp to the file dates.txt

Viewing files

<filename

cat

cat filename
  output file to screen
cat -n filename
  output file to screen w/ line numbers
cat filename1 filename2
  output two files (concatinate)
cat filename1 > filename2
  overwrite filename2 with filename1
cat filename1 >> filename2
  append filename1 to filename2
cat filename{1,2} > filename2
  add filename1 and filename2 together into filename3

head

head filename
  top 10 lines of file
head -23 filename
  top 23 lines of file

tail

tail filename
  bottom 10 lines of file
tail -23 filename
  bottom 23 lines of file

Other

sed -n 20,30p filename
  print lines 20..30 of file [35]
  • MultiTail allows you to monitor logfiles and command output in multiple windows in a terminal, colorize, filter and merge.

File pagers

more

more is a filter for paging through text one screenful at a time. This version is especially primitive. Users should realize that less(1) provides more(1) emulation plus extensive enhancements.

less

less is an improvement on more and a funny name.

most

vimpager

other

Moving files

mv

mv position1 ~/position2
  basic move

Removing files

rm

rm file

rm -rf directory
find * -maxdepth 0 -name 'keepthis' -prune -o -exec rm -rf '{}' ';'
  remove all but keepthis [38]

Managing files

mc

ranger

  • http://ranger.nongnu.org/ - ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy. It ships with "rifle", a file launcher that is good at automatically finding out which program to use for what file type.

setup ~/.config/ranger/ with defaults;

ranger --copy-config=all

Vifm

  • Vifm is an ncurses based file manager with vi like keybindings/modes/options/commands/configuration, which also borrows some useful ideas from mutt.

If you use vi, Vifm gives you complete keyboard control over your files without having to learn a new set of commands.

deer

lscd

nnn

Other

  • https://github.com/D630/fzf-fs - acts like a very simple and configurable file browser/navigator for the command line by taking advantage of the general-purpose fuzzy finder fzf. Although coming without Miller columns, fzf-fs is inspired by tools like lscd and deer, which both follow the example set by ranger. [39]

Finding files

ls | sort -f | uniq -i -d
  # list duplicate files taking upper/lower case into account [40]
whereis

GNU findutils

GNU Find Utilities are the basic directory searching utilities of the GNU operating system. These programs are typically used in conjunction with other programs to provide modular and powerful directory search and file locating capabilities to other commands.

The tools supplied with this package are:

  • find - search for files in a directory hierarchy
  • locate - list files in databases that match a pattern
  • updatedb - update a file name database
  • xargs - build and execute command lines from standard input
find
find /usr/share -name README
find ~/Journalism -name '*.txt'
find ~/Programming -path '*/src/*.c'
find ~/Journalism -name '*.txt' -exec cat {} ;
  exec command on result path (aliases don't work in exec argument) 
find ~/Images/Screenshots -size +500k -iname '*.jpg'
find ~/Journalism -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 cat   (faster than above)

find / -group [group]
find / -user [user]
find . -mtime -[n]
  File's data was last modified n*24 hours ago

find . -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
  remove files older than 5 days
find . -type f -links +1
  list hard links


  • https://github.com/sharkdp/fd - a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find. While it does not seek to mirror all of find's powerful functionality, it provides sensible (opinionated) defaults for 80% of the use cases.
xargs

xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial-arguments followed by items read from standard input. Blank lines on the standard input are ignored.

Because Unix filenames can contain blanks and newlines, this default behaviour is often problematic; filenames containing blanks and/or newlines are in‐correctly processed by xargs. In these situations it is better to use the -0 option, which prevents such problems. When using this option you will need to ensure that the program which produces the input for xargs also uses a null character as a separator. If that program is GNU find for example, the -print0 option does this for you.

If any invocation of the command exits with a status of 255, xargs will stop immediately without reading any further input. An error message is issued on stderr when this happens.

echo 'one two three' | xargs mkdir
ls
$ one two three

echo 'one two three' | xargs -t rm
$ rm one two three
find . -name '*.py' | xargs wc -l
  # Recursively find all Python files and count the number of lines

find . -name '*~' | xargs -0 rm
  # Recursively find all Emacs backup files and remove them, alloging for filenames with whitespace

find . -name '*.py' | xargs grep 'import'
  # Recursively find all Python files and search them for the word ‘import’
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c "%y %s %n"
  # prints permissions in octal (0775, etc.)
find . -name "*.ext" -print0 | xargs -n 1000 -I '{}' mv '{}' ../..
  # for a number of files to high for the mv command (move to two directories up)

locate

locate fileordirectory

locate /

locate / | xargs -i echo 'test -f "{}" && echo "{}"' | sh
  # only files

locate / | xargs -i echo 'test -f "{}" && echo "{}"' | sh
  # only directories [42]

"Although in other distros locate and updatedb are in the findutils package, they are no longer present in Arch's package. To use it, install the mlocate package. mlocate is a newer implementation of the tool, but is used in exactly the same way."

mlocate is a locate/updatedb implementation. The 'm' stands for "merging": updatedb reuses the existing database to avoid rereading most of the file system, which makes updatedb faster and does not trash the system caches as much. The locate(1) utility is intended to be completely compatible to slocate. It also attempts to be compatible to GNU locate, when it does not conflict with slocate compatibility.


Before locate can be used, the database will need to be created. To do this, simply run updatedb as root.

sudo updatedb
  # creates/updates a db file of paths that is queried by locate

/etc/updatedb.conf

PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS = "yes"
PRUNEFS = "9p afs anon_inodefs auto autofs bdev binfmt_misc cgroup cifs coda configfs cpuset cramfs debugfs devpts devtmpfs ecryptfs exofs ftpfs fuse fuse.encfs fuse.sshfs fusectl gfs gfs2 hugetlbfs inotifyfs iso9660 jffs2 lustre mqueue ncpfs nfs nfs4 nfsd pipefs proc ramfs rootfs rpc_pipefs securityfs selinuxfs sfs shfs smbfs sockfs sshfs sysfs tmpfs ubifs udf usbfs vboxsf"
PRUNENAMES = ".git .hg .svn"
PRUNEPATHS = "/afs /media /mnt /net /sfs /tmp /udev /var/cache /var/lib/pacman/local /var/lock /var/run /var/spool /var/tmp"

/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db


strings /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db | grep -E '^/.*config'
  # query db directly, needs sudo or sudoers or acl

to sort


Archiving

shar

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/shar - an abbreviation of shell archive) is an archive format. A shar file is a shell script, and executing it will recreate the files. This is a type of self-extracting archive file. It can be created with the Unix shar utility. To extract the files, only the standard Unix Bourne shell sh is usually required. Note that shar is not specified by the Single Unix Specification, so it is not formally a component of Unix, but a legacy utility.

unshar programs have been written for other operating systems but are not always reliable; shar files are shell scripts and can theoretically do anything that a shell script can do (including using incompatible features of enhanced or workalike shells), limiting their utility outside the Unix world.

The drawback of self-extracting shell scripts (any kind, not just shar) is that they rely on a particular implementation of programs; shell archives created with older versions of makeself

GNU paxutils

cpio
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cpio - The cpio archive format has several basic limitations: It does not store user and group names, only numbers. As a result, it cannot be reliably used to transfer files between systems with dissimilar user and group numbering.
tar
-z: Compress archive using gzip program
-c: Create archive
-v: Verbose i.e display progress while creating archive
-f: Archive File name
tar -zcvf archive-name.tar.gz directory-name

tar -cjf foo.tar.bz2 bar/
  create bzipped tar archive of the directory bar called foo.tar.bz2
tar -xvf foo.tar
  verbosely extract foo.tar
tar -xzf foo.tar.gz
  extract gzipped foo.tar.gz

tar -xjf foo.tar.bz2 -C bar/
  extract bzipped foo.tar.bz2 after changing directory to bar
tar -xzf foo.tar.gz blah.txt
  extract the file blah.txt from foo.tar.gz
pax
  • pax will read, write, and list the members of an archive file, and will copy directory hierarchies. pax operation is independent of the specific archive format, and supports a wide variety of different archive formats. A list of supported archive formats can be found under the description of the -x option. [44]
mkdir newdir
cd olddir
pax -rw . newdir

Compression



  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pack_(compression) - a (now deprecated) Unix shell compression program based on Huffman coding. The unpack utility will restore files to their original state after they have been compressed using the pack utility. If no files are specified, the standard input will be uncompressed to the standard output.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/compress a Unix shell compression program based on the LZW compression algorithm.[1] Compared to more modern compression utilities such as gzip and bzip2, compress performs faster and with less memory usage, at the cost of a significantly lower compression ratio. The uncompress utility will restore files to their original state after they have been compressed using the compress utility. If no files are specified, the standard input will be uncompressed to the standard output.






zip

zip
unzip

unzip -l archive.zip
  # list files in archive

for z in *.zip; do unzip $z; done
  # unzip all in folder, overwrite files automatically

gzip

  • gzip, gunzip, zcat - compress or expand files

bzip2

7z

  • 7-Zip is a file archiver with the highest compression ratio. The program supports 7z (that implements LZMA compression algorithm), ZIP, CAB, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats. Compression ratio in the new 7z format is 30-50% better than ratio in ZIP format.
    • p7zip is a port of 7za.exe for POSIX systems like Unix (Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Cygwin, AIX, ...), MacOS X and also for BeOS and Amiga. 7za.exe is the command line version of 7-zip, see http://www.7-zip.org/. 7-Zip is a file archiver with highest compression ratio.
    • man z7 (p7zip)
    • p7zip-light in AUR
7z x filename
  extract archive with directories

7z a myzip ./MyFolder/*
  add a folder to an archive

xz

tar -cvJf filename.tar.xz directory/* morefiles..
  # create verbose xz filearchive

LZ4

LZMA

ZSTD

Helpers

  • dtrx extracts archives in a number of different formats; it currently supports tar, zip (including self-extracting .exe files), cpio, rpm, deb, gem, 7z, cab, rar, lzh, and InstallShield files. It can also decompress files compressed with gzip, bzip2, lzma, xz, or compress. In addition to providing one command to handle many different archive types, dtrx also aids the user by extracting contents consistently. By default, everything will be written to a dedicated directory that's named after the archive. dtrx will also change the permissions to ensure that the owner can read and write all those files.
  • atool - a script for managing file archives of various types (tar, tar+gzip, zip etc). The main command is aunpack which extracts files from an archive. Did you ever extract files from an archive, not checking whether the files were located in a subdirectory or in the top directory of the archive, resulting in files scattered all over the place? aunpack overcomes this problem by first extracting to a new directory. If there was only a single file in the archive, that file is moved to the original directory. aunpack also prevents local files from being overwritten by mistake.
# Extract Files
extract() {
 if [ -f $1 ] ; then
     case $1 in
         *.tar.bz2)   tar xvjf $1    ;;
         *.tar.gz)    tar xvzf $1    ;;
         *.tar.xz)    tar xvJf $1    ;;
         *.bz2)       bunzip2 $1     ;;
         *.rar)       unrar x $1     ;;
         *.gz)        gunzip $1      ;;
         *.tar)       tar xvf $1     ;;
         *.tbz2)      tar xvjf $1    ;;
         *.tgz)       tar xvzf $1    ;;
         *.zip)       unzip $1       ;;
         *.Z)         uncompress $1  ;;
         *.7z)        7z x $1        ;;
         *.xz)        unxz $1        ;;
         *.exe)       cabextract $1  ;;
         *)           echo "\`$1': unrecognized file compression" ;;
     esac
 else
     echo "\`$1' is not a valid file"
 fi
}

Pagers

File types



xdg-mime default Thunar.desktop inode/directory
  to make Thunar the default file-browser

xdg-mime default xpdf.desktop application/pdf
  to use xpdf as the default PDF viewer


/usr/share/applications/defaults.list
  # global
~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list
  # per user, overrides global

~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

~/.local/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache


[Default Applications]
mimetype=desktopfile1;desktopfile2;...;desktopfileN




Trash can