---
title: 'Useful Commands'
date: 2023-09-26T12:04:05-04:00
tags: ["shell", "script", "command line"]
author: "Me"
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description: 'A collection and living document of useful shell commands that I use.'
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---

This post will act a bit like a living document of all the useful commands and short scripts that I use regularly. Some will
be as simple as `ls | wc -l` which counts the number of files in your current working directory, and others will be better
suited to small scripts. As this grows, I will hopefully break these into more logical categories.

## Find by File type

This command will find every file in your current working directory by the specified file extension.

```bash
find . -type f -name '*.txt'
```

As a bonus, if you wanted find everything _except_ that file extension, you can add a `!` before name. In other words:

```bash
find . type -f ! -name '*.txt'
```

I usually use commands like this to clean up files that I don't need, be it file extensions I don't need anymore, or anything
with a specific word in its file name, so adding `-delete` at the end of the command lets me delete those files.

```bash
find . type -f -name '*.txt' -delete
```

## List Files & Dir +

Using `ls` is a _key_ command for anyone that works within a command line. If you've used `ls` before, then you've also
likely used or created an alias for `ls -la` which will display the files, their user:group ownership, permissions
(`drwxrwxrwx`) and dates created + modified.

What if you just want to found the number of files? Not measuring disk usage or free space, but the equivalent of `len` for
an array, the array being your current working directory. Enter `wc`!

```bash
ls | wc- l
```