Questions tagged [filenames]

File name is a name used to identify a file uniquely on given file system.

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218 votes
8 answers
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Why is looping over find's output bad practice?

This question is inspired by Why is using a shell loop to process text considered bad practice ? I see these constructs for file in `find . -type f -name ...`; do smth with ${file}; done and for ...
don_crissti's user avatar
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151 votes
6 answers
29k views

How does Linux handle multiple consecutive 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 ...
Falmarri's user avatar
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233 votes
9 answers
308k views

Looping through files with spaces in the names? [duplicate]

I wrote the following script to diff the outputs of two directores with all the same files in them as such: #!/bin/bash for file in `find . -name "*.csv"` do echo "file = $file"; diff $...
Amir Afghani's user avatar
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51 votes
4 answers
19k views

How to find out which (not installed) Debian package a file belongs to?

On Debian systems (and derivatives): $ dpkg --search /bin/ls coreutils: /bin/ls That is, the file /bin/ls belongs to the Debian package named coreutils. But this only works if the package is ...
tshepang's user avatar
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217 votes
11 answers
177k views

List files sorted numerically

I have a bunch of files from log1 to log164. I'm trying to LIST the directory (sorted) in a UNIX terminal but the sort functions are only providing the format like this: home:logs Home$ ls -1 | sort ...
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60 votes
3 answers
20k views

unix, difference between path starting with '/' and '//' [duplicate]

In unix/linux, any number of consecutive forwardslashes in a path is generally equivalent to a single forwardslash. eg. $ cd /home/shum $ pwd /home/shum $ cd /home//shum $ pwd /home/shum $ cd /home///...
Shum's user avatar
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55 votes
16 answers
33k views

How can I delete a file which filename has non-printing characters

I somehow managed to create a file that doesn't seem to have a filename. I found some information regarding how to get more details of the file in the following thread. However, I tried some of the ...
Mr Moose's user avatar
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125 votes
9 answers
12k views

On what systems is //foo/bar different from /foo/bar?

Throughout the POSIX specification, there's provision (1, 2, 3...) to allow implementations to treat a path starting with two / specially. A POSIX application (an application written to the POSIX ...
Stéphane Chazelas's user avatar
33 votes
2 answers
3k views

Security implications of running perl -ne '...' *

Apparently, running: perl -n -e 'some perl code' * Or find . ... -exec perl -n -e '...' {} + (same with -p instead of -n) Or perl -e 'some code using <>' * often found in one-liners ...
Stéphane Chazelas's user avatar
35 votes
2 answers
11k views

Why does inode value change when we edit in "vi" editor?

When I edit a file in the vi editor, the inode value of the file changes. But when edited with the cat command, the inode value does not change.
monu's user avatar
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31 votes
2 answers
40k views

What is the difference between "du -sh *" and "du -sh ./*"?

What's the difference between du -sh * and du -sh ./* ? Note: What interests me is the * and ./* parts.
Biswanath's user avatar
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6 votes
1 answer
10k views

Rename All Files with a Certain Name

I'm trying to find certain files with the name "stringx" and replace the name (but not the extension) with "stringy". So basically for stringx.txt and stingx.cs, I'd want stringy.txt and stringy.cs. I'...
Aaron Newton's user avatar
87 votes
4 answers
66k 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 / character on ...
Cory Klein's user avatar
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26 votes
4 answers
25k views

Is it correct to use certain special characters when naming filenames in Linux?

Is it correct to use certain special characters, as +, &, ', . (dot) and , (comma), basically, in filenames. I understand that you can use - and _ with no problem, but doing some research I have ...
Chris Klein's user avatar
25 votes
3 answers
61k views

What are ./ and ../ directories?

Simple question, but I'm not sure where to look and google doesn't respond to periods and slashes. I'm just trying to count the # of files & directories in the current directory (not including ...
Adam's user avatar
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18 votes
3 answers
27k views

Why are filenames that start with a dot hidden? Can I hide files without using a dot as their first character?

Initially I thought it was a coincidence, but now I see there's even a tag for it: all hidden file names start with a dot. Is this a convention? Why was it chosen? Can it be changed? Or in other words ...
JMCF125's user avatar
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85 votes
6 answers
32k views

recursive statistics on file types in directory?

I did a website scrape for a conversion project. I'd like to do some statistics on the types of files in there -- for instance, 400 .html files, 100 .gif, etc. What's an easy way to do this? It has to ...
user394's user avatar
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33 votes
2 answers
28k views

Remove prefixes from filenames

I have a bunch of files as follows: 04602635_b0294.DAT20120807164534 04602637_b0297.DAT20120807164713 04602638_b0296.DAT20120807164637 04602639_b0299.DAT20120807164819 04602640_b0298....
Pieter van Niekerk's user avatar
16 votes
1 answer
12k views

What does *~ mean?

At the end of a makefile I saw rm -f *~ *.class I understand the *.class, but what's *~?
Xodarap's user avatar
  • 3,673
58 votes
3 answers
121k views

Split a file by line and have control over resulting files extension

There is a standard command for file splitting - split. For example, if I want to split a words file in several chunks of 10000 lines, I can use: split -dl 10000 words wrd It would generate several ...
Rogach's user avatar
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32 votes
4 answers
38k views

dirname and basename vs parameter expansion

Is there any objective reason to prefer one form to the other? Performance, reliability, portability? filename=/some/long/path/to/a_file parentdir_v1="${filename%/*}" parentdir_v2="$(dirname "$...
Wildcard's user avatar
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31 votes
5 answers
99k views

Extract file name from path in awk program

I have an awk script and I have passed a CSV file to it. awk -f script.awk /home/abc/imp/asgd.csv What am I doing is to get FILENAME within script.awk. FILENAME gives me the whole path. As I am in ...
Aashu's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
1k views

Redirect a file descriptor before execution

I know that I can change the file a program writes to by interrupting the process in gdb, closing using the file descriptor and then re-opening with the file name I want. Is there a way to do the same ...
user3856370's user avatar
112 votes
2 answers
41k views

What does dash "-" at the end of a command mean?

Given the following command: gzip -dc /cdrom/cdrom0/file.tar.gz | tar xvf – What does the - at the end of the command mean? Is it some kind of placeholder?
Eugene S's user avatar
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77 votes
8 answers
92k views

Converting relative path to absolute path without symbolic link

Is there a Unix command to get the absolute (and canonicalized) path from a relative path which may contain symbolic links?
Benjamin's user avatar
  • 1,515
29 votes
3 answers
6k views

Newlines in filenames

I understand and accept the premise that defensive1 shell scripting is both prudent and, in the longer term, more sustainable. Many of the answers to text processing questions here follow this ...
jasonwryan's user avatar
11 votes
2 answers
4k views

Trailing slashes on symbolic links to directories

I'm trying to emulate the process of path resolution (see man page path_resolution) in unix-like systems. My OS is Linux with GNU coreutils 8.7. In order to clarify the meaning of extra trailing '/' ...
ymfoi's user avatar
  • 383
7 votes
4 answers
5k views

How to find missing files with sequential names? [duplicate]

I have thousands of files named 1.txt 2.txt and so on. Some of those files are missing. Which would be the easiest way to find out which files are missing?
Sofia Ontiveros's user avatar
7 votes
1 answer
4k views

Best way to remove file extension from a string?

So, I'm using a script I've made to convert videos to the webm format. A certain program calls the script, sending %f which is the full, absolute file name of the video, like this: converter.sh %f ...
Tomas's user avatar
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6 votes
5 answers
24k views

Stripping directory paths to get file names

What I am doing is converting mp3's with LAME. I already have an old script I wrote that works but I want to add to it this ability--to no longer delete the file but instead save it in a new root ...
uxserx-bw's user avatar
  • 506
4 votes
6 answers
17k views

File extensions and association with programs in linux

In windows we can associate a file's extension with programs. E.g. a file test.pl can be run by the installed Perl interpreter due to the pl extension. In linux though it needs #!/usr/bin/perl as the ...
Cratylus's user avatar
  • 519
50 votes
10 answers
84k views

Grabbing the extension in a file name

How do I get the file extension from bash? Here's what I tried: filename=`basename $filepath` fileext=${filename##*.} By doing that I can get extension of bz2 from the path /dir/subdir/file.bz2, but ...
uray's user avatar
  • 3,880
27 votes
3 answers
2k views

Why does awk stop and wait if the filename contains = and how to work around that?

awk 'processing_script_here' my=file.txt seems to stop and wait indefinitely... What's going on here and how do I make it work ?
don_crissti's user avatar
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26 votes
9 answers
6k views

Clipboard for copying and pasting files in command line?

In Bash, suppose I visit a directory, and then another directory. I would like to copy a file from the first directory to the second directory, but without specifying the long pathnames of them. Is it ...
Tim's user avatar
  • 102k
26 votes
3 answers
15k views

Understanding Unix file name encoding

I have a hard time understanding how the file name encoding works. On unix.SE I find contradicting explanations. File names are stored as characters To quote another answer: Several questions about ...
Marco's user avatar
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23 votes
9 answers
58k views

Count files in a directory by extension

For the purpose of testing, I'd like count how many images files are inside a directory, separating each image file type by file extension (jpg="yes". This because later it will be useful for another ...
watchmansky's user avatar
17 votes
6 answers
139k views

how to extract part of a filename before '.' or before extension

I have files in format below: abc_asdfjhdsf_dfksfj_12345678.csv hjjhk_hkjh_asd_asd_sd_98765498.csv hgh_nn_25342134.exe I want to get the value before the . and after the last _. The result would ...
shah's user avatar
  • 171
5 votes
6 answers
3k views

How do I remove a file I accidentally created named $file?

I was working on a shell script and I accidentally created a file with the variable as its name. Now I have $file in my ls output, and cannot remove it. What can I do?
Square's user avatar
  • 145
85 votes
1 answer
110k views

How to list files in a zip without extra information in command line

In my bash command line, when I use unzip -l test.zip I get the output like this: Archive: test.zip Length Date Time Name --------- ---------- ----- ---- 810000 05-07-2014 15:09 ...
рüффп's user avatar
  • 1,707
58 votes
3 answers
55k views

What charset encoding is used for filenames and paths on Linux?

Does it depend on what file system I use? For example, ext2/ext3/ext4 but also what happens when I insert one of those "joliet" CD-ROMs with ISO 9660? I've heard that POSIX contains some sort of spec ...
martin's user avatar
  • 581
58 votes
7 answers
130k views

File extensions for unix shell scripts [closed]

On wikipedia, the article for .sh says: For the .sh file extension type, see Bourne shell. How about other unix shells? I know that the shebang is used inside the file to indicate an ...
Amelio Vazquez-Reina's user avatar
42 votes
5 answers
14k views

Glob with Numerical Order

I have this list of pdf files in a directory: c0.pdf c12.pdf c15.pdf c18.pdf c20.pdf c4.pdf c7.pdf c10.pdf c13.pdf c16.pdf c19.pdf c2.pdf c5.pdf c8.pdf c11.pdf c14.pdf c17.pdf c1.pdf ...
moooeeeep's user avatar
  • 1,313
36 votes
1 answer
14k views

rsync: colon in file names

Other than by renaming the files first, how can I rsync files that may have colons in their names?
WIZARDELF's user avatar
  • 558
36 votes
2 answers
61k views

What does the tilde (~) mean at the end of a filename? [duplicate]

What is the file with the ~ at the end of the filename for? $ ls # aliased to add flags -rwxrwxr-x 1 durrantm 2741 May 16 09:28 strip_out_rspec_prep_cmds.sh~* drwxrwxr-x 13 durrantm 4096 May 16 14:...
Michael Durrant's user avatar
29 votes
3 answers
64k views

What does the ./ mean (dot slash) in linux?

For example, I can do the following touch a or touch ./a Then when I do ls I can view both, so what exactly is the ./ for?
K Split X's user avatar
  • 1,723
22 votes
9 answers
38k views

Displaying file names with contents when using the "cat" command

Is there a command to show the directory or file name when using cat to display the contents of files? For example: assume two files f1.txt and f2.txt are in ./tmp ./tmp/f1.txt ./tmp/f2.txt Then ...
user avatar
20 votes
3 answers
27k views

How to exclude some files from filename expansion mechanism in bash?

I have ubuntu file system directories in the root directory and I accidentally copied hundreds of files into root directory. I intuitively tried to remove copied files by excluding file system like ...
kenn's user avatar
  • 753
10 votes
2 answers
5k views

Is it possible to fake a specific path for a process?

I'm trying to run ADB on a linux server with multiple users where I am not root (to play with my android emulator). The adb daemon writes its logs to the file /tmp/adb.log which unfortunately seems to ...
gluk47's user avatar
  • 238
10 votes
2 answers
37k views

passing filename with spaces to a shell script [duplicate]

The shellscript is very simple: retroarch $* -c /tmp/retroarch/Data/retroarch/gambatte.cfg ("retroarch" is another shellscript) If the filename passed contains spaces it fails: RetroArch [ERROR] ::...
eadmaster's user avatar
  • 1,643
9 votes
1 answer
5k views

Handling names with leading dash in bash shell [duplicate]

How can I handle (e.g. apply mv command) in a command shell the files with leading dash (-) in names? The command mv -weirdfilename.zip normalfilename.zip naturally accepts - at the beginning of a ...
astrsk's user avatar
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