A file system structure in which to store computer files.
32
votes
6answers
3k views
How linux handles multiple path separators (/home////username///file)
I'm working on a python script that passes file locations to an scp subprocess. That's all fine, but I'm in a situation where I may end up concatenating a path with a filename such that there's a ...
6
votes
3answers
640 views
How to run a command when a directory's contents are updated?
There is a directory A whose contents are changed frequently by other people.
I have made a personal directory B where I keep all the files that have ever been in A.
Currently I just occasionally ...
44
votes
3answers
10k views
Why do directories need the executable (X) permission to be opened?
In my CMS, I noticed that directories need the executable bit (+x) set for the user to open them. Why is the execute permission required to read a directory?
13
votes
6answers
1k views
Any way to sync directory structure when the files are already on both sides?
I have two drives with the same files, but the directory structure is totally different.
Is there any way to 'move' all the files on the destination side so that they match the structure of the ...
19
votes
3answers
968 views
What does size of a directory mean in output of 'ls -l' command?
What does size of a directory mean in output of ls -l command?
38
votes
2answers
1k views
Why does '/' have an '..' entry?
This just baffles me. Why does the root directory contain a reference to a parent directory?
bob@bob:/$ ls -a
. build home lib32 mnt .rpmdb sys vmlinuz
.. cdrom ...
11
votes
2answers
4k views
Do the parent directory's permissions matter when accessing a subdirectory?
If I have a root folder with some restrictive permission, let's say 600, and if the child folders/files have 777 permission will everybody be able to read/write/execute the child file even though the ...
47
votes
2answers
36k views
How to set default file permissions for all folders/files in a directory?
I want to set a folder such that anything created within it (directories, files) inherit default permissions and group.
Lets call the group "media". And also, the folders/files created within the ...
8
votes
2answers
1k views
How to remove all empty directories in a subtree?
How can I remove all empty directories in a subtree? I used something like
find . -type d -exec rmdir {} 2>/dev/null \;
but I needs to be run multiple times in order to remove directories ...
27
votes
5answers
2k views
The result of ls * , ls ** and ls ***
I know using the command ls will list all the directories. But what does the ls * command do ? I used it and it just lists the directories. Is the star in front of ls means how deep it can list the ...
20
votes
7answers
3k views
What does the .d stand for in directory names?
I know many directories with .d in their name:
init.d
yum.repos.d
conf.d
Does it mean directory? If yes, from what does this disambiguate?
UPDATE: I've had many interesting answers about what the ...
26
votes
2answers
832 views
Why is '.' a hard link in Unix?
I've seen many explanations for why the link count for an empty directory in Unix based OSes is 2 instead of 1. They all say that it's because of the '.' directory, which every directory has pointing ...
7
votes
6answers
4k views
What's the best way to count the number of files in a directory?
If parsing the output of ls is dangerous because it can break on some funky characters (spaces, \n, ... ), what's the best way to know the number of files in a directory?
I usualy rely on find to ...
6
votes
3answers
4k views
How can I move files by type recursively from a directory and its sub-directories to another directory?
What would be a good way to move a file type from a directory and all of its sub-directories?
Like "move all *.ogg in /thisdir recursively to /somedir". I tried a couple of things; my best effort was ...
9
votes
3answers
801 views
When should I use a trailing slash on a directory? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
How linux handles multiple path separators (/home////username///file)
Most commands I use in linux behave exactly the same whether I include the trailing slash / ...
2
votes
1answer
1k views
In Linux, “Write” Permission Is Equivalent To “Execute” For Directories?
The Execute permission makes sense for files (which include scripts etc), but when it comes to directories, write (w) permission works the same way as execute (x), right? Which means, if we are giving ...
8
votes
4answers
1k views
How are directories implemented in Unix filesystems?
My question is how directories are implemented? I can believe a data structure like a variable e.g. table, array or similar. Since UNIX is Open Source I can look in the source what the program does ...
2
votes
2answers
183 views
Searching for string in files
Is there an easy way to search inside 1000s of files in a complex directory structure to find files which contain a specific string within the file?
1
vote
1answer
303 views
How can I make ls show information about the directory specified only, not info about its sub-files or folder contents?
Say I have folder "foo" residing, the home directory. I want to get some info of it, owner, group, permissions, etc...
I then do this to try to get the information:
cd ~
ls -l foo
Of course it now ...
12
votes
1answer
329 views
How to find all the links to a directory
When I stat a directory I get a listing that tell me there are 5 links to the directory.
stat dir
My question is how do I get information (names and locations) to all these 5 links?
5
votes
3answers
263 views
“mkdir foo; svn mv * foo”
I often want to do some variant of this idiom:
$ mkdir 2010
$ svn mv * 2010
Of course, I get an error because the glob matches 2010 as well:
svn: Cannot copy path '2010' into its own child ...
3
votes
1answer
242 views
Can't rename a directory that I own
I have a directory with a big load of sub directories. I own all of them, and the permissions are all 777.
pascal@azazel /box $ ls -al
total 147872
drwxr-xr-x 293 root root 12288 aoû 22 19:44 ...
3
votes
1answer
195 views
How does the Linux file structure work?
I see the different folders bin, dev, mnt, proc, srv, sys, etc.
What are the properties of all these different folders? What are there purposes? Are there files in some of them that I should not ...
3
votes
1answer
270 views
creating abbreviations for commonly used paths
I am new to linux and was wondering whether it is possible to create abbreviations that can be used in terminal. I know about alias command, but am not sure whether that can be used for what I am ...
19
votes
5answers
5k views
How can I create a /dev/null-like “blackhole” directory?
I would like to create a "/dev/null" directory (or a "blackhole" directory) such that any files written to it are not really written, but just disappear.
I have an application that writes out large ...
11
votes
5answers
6k views
Script to monitor folder for new files?
How do I detect new files in a folder with a bash script? I would like to process the files as soon as they are created in the folder. Is this possible to do so or do I have to schedule a script with ...
29
votes
2answers
7k views
Why hard links not allowed to directories in UNIX/Linux
I read in text books that UNIX/Linux doesn't allows hard links to directories but soft links do. Is it because, when we have cycles and if we create hardlinks, and after some time we delete the ...
15
votes
3answers
2k views
Why unix mv program doesn't need -R (recursive) option for directories but cp does need it?
This is a kind of "wtf?" question, so I'm sorry if I will disturb someone's vision of how things should be or if I will just annoy you with the "stupid" question.
I always get messed up when need to ...
11
votes
4answers
3k views
Converting relative path to absolute path
Is there a *nix command to get absolute(and canonicalized) path from relative path(with current path) or symbolic link?
9
votes
4answers
2k views
symbolic link to a directory and relative path
I've created symlink with absolute path to the directory (Blink) and have for example following tree:
$ ls -l /tmp/A
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Apr 3 12:27 Blink -> /tmp/B
-rw-r--r-- 1 root ...
15
votes
4answers
589 views
Is there any way attacker could use mkdir to compromise a system?
I'm setting up a restricted user account for user ricardo, a troublesome user on my system. I want to grant him the right to make directories using sudo, which he sometimes needs to do. I'm ...
8
votes
3answers
473 views
Lowercasing all directories under a directory
I want to lowercase every directories' name under a directory. With which commands can I do that?
4
votes
1answer
364 views
Shell script printing the most visited directories
Is there a way to write a bash script with the following functionalities?
Be launched when I press some key or key combination. (not so important requirement)
Identify the 7 most visited directories ...
18
votes
2answers
879 views
Where do the files go if you mount a drive to a folder that already contains files?
I just accidentally mounted a new drive to a folder that already contained files. I don't care about them and have them somewhere else, but that folder appears empty now. I'm curious what happened ...
17
votes
2answers
1k views
How can I calculate the size of a directory?
How to know the size of a directory? Including subdirectories and files.
9
votes
5answers
1k views
Creating numerous directories using mkdir
I would like to create many directories using mkdir. Each directory name will consist of a prefix (a string) and an index (an integer). Suppose that I would like the prefix to be "s" and the indices ...
8
votes
2answers
699 views
the slash (/) after a directory name on shell commands
I have a little question here.
If I have two files, say filea and fileb, mv filea fileb would
delete fileb
rename filea to fileb
Then if I have two directories, say dira and dirb, mv dira dirb ...
5
votes
3answers
864 views
On deep-created directories
In Windows, there is a certain limit on the number of characters in
a path, which restricts how deep a directory can be created. I was
wondering what the case is like in Linux?
Do you have some ...
4
votes
1answer
158 views
Why could the size of the “dot file” /. exceed 4096?
Today I found an "empty" directory with a size of 4MB.
It had no visible contents, so I tried ls -lah. This showed me some hidden files (not very large). Searching for the reason why the directory ...
3
votes
3answers
2k views
Using sftp to Transfer a Directory?
When I try to use sftp to transfer a directory containing files, I get an error message:
skipping non-regular file directory_name
The directory contains a couple of files and two subdirectories.
...
3
votes
2answers
246 views
Permissions of webserver's root directory
I've had this issue on several setups, and I'm unsure of how to handle it.
At first, all of /var is owned by root:root. Clearly I don't want the web directory to be owned by root, so I do chown ...
4
votes
1answer
128 views
What is the tool that allows me to specify arbitrary directories using **
I once saw a colleague uses a tool which allows to use ** to represent any directories. For example: if a file called myfile.java sits deep inside:
src/main/com/mycompany/product/store/myfile.java
...
3
votes
2answers
267 views
A question about permissions of hierarchical directories
I have some directories, with following permissions:
drwxr-xr-x 18 user1 root 4096 Oct 27 11:25 /home/test1/test2
drwxr-xr-x 24 user1 root 4096 Oct 21 08:38 /home/test1
drwxr-xr-x 492 root root 12288 ...
2
votes
2answers
1k views
undo rm -r, restore data
I was playing around with zip and accidentally deleted my /home/ folder (i wanted to delete home/ which got created by unzipping an archive).
I used rm -r /home/instead of rm -r home/ as root...
Is ...
2
votes
4answers
509 views
Make directory copies using find
I have a directory with a bunch of subdirectories in it. Thus
/usr/local/src/ccl/ccl-1.8/x86-headers$ ls
elf gl gmp gnome2 gtk2 jni libc
Each of these directories has a further subdirectory C ...
2
votes
1answer
1k views
Why can't list file/directory relative to .. from a symbolic link directory (No such file or directory)?
I have a /usr/tomcat6/logs directory linked to /var/log/tomcat6.
When I changed directory to /usr/tomcat6/logs and try to ls files using a relative pathname ../conf/Catalina/localhost, a No such file ...
1
vote
2answers
90 views
Can one copy a relpath in one command?
I find myself doing this often enough that I wonder if there's a standard Unix way to do it:
% mkdir -p /TARGETDIR/relative/path/to
% cp ./relative/path/to/somefile /TARGETDIR/relative/path/to
In ...
1
vote
2answers
132 views
Why can I only run a .sh file from the parent directory, not the child directory
I am a Linux noob. I noticed that this does not work:
/tomcatDirectory/bin $ startup.sh //command not found
but this does work
/tomcatDirectory $ bin/startup.sh
I am used to Windows. It seems ...
