some more neat unix tricks

scp when there are too many arguments

Sometimes you want to retrieve a lot of files from a remote location but the expension of star (*) in bash returns the following error

Argument list too long

One way of fixing it is to leverage find and its nice -exec switch:

$ ssh <user>@<remote-host> 'find <path-where-files-are> -type f -name "<some-regex>" | tar czvf - --files-from -' | tar zxvf - -C <local-destination>

As a reminder, following command allows to retrieve the max number of arguments that can be passed to a command:

$ getconf ARG_MAX

Reload groups without logging out

Simple trick to avoid to log out to apply new groups

$ id
$ su - $USER
$ id

Find file newer or older than a specific date

Create a file with the to-be-tested timestamp (format: YYYYMMDDHHMM, see also the manpage)

$ touch -t 201501010000 /tmp/timestamp

Then query with find

$ find <some-path> -newer /tmp/timestamp
$ find <some-path> -not -newer /tmp/timestamp

Chown symlink

How to chown a symlink

$ chown -h <user>:<group> <symlink>

Gateway routing

Check which gateway would be used for routing a specific IP:

$ ip route get <IP>

Randomize-lines replacement

The package Randomize-lines that provides the quite useful rl for randomizing lines has been removed in latest Ubuntu version (Xenial and newer).

A replacement for this is the shuf tool.

For example to retrieve a random line from a file

$ shuf -n 1 <some-file>

script duration

Ever wanted to know the duration of a specific bash script ? The following oneliner allows to do that easily:

date -u -d @${SECONDS} +%T

ps tree-style

Display ps output with the processes hierarchy:

ps aux --forest