Into.the.Void.

I was trying to figure out one 1-liner to delete all empty directories in a tree.
The following should do it’s job:
%find -type d -empty | xargs rm -rvf

BUT! While this works for directories with “regular” filenames, it doesn’t work when there are special characters inside the filename. Consider this for example:

%ls -1
test 1
test2
test _ 3
%find -type d -empty
./test 1
./test2
./test _ 3
%find -type d -empty | xargs rm -rvf
removed directory: `./test2'
%find -type d -empty
./test 1
./test _ 3


Only directory “test2” was deleted. To delete the rest of the directories when they contain “special” characters like whitespace and quotes one needs to modify the command like this:

%find -type d -empty -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rvf
removed directory: `./test 1'
removed directory: `./test _ 3 '

🙂

Filed by kargig at 20:50 under Linux
Tags: delete, directory, Linux, oneliner, xargs
4 Comments | 22,787 views

I’ve just updated by .zshrc so that I can get the exit status of commands on a “right prompt” using zsh’s RPROMPT variable. Exit status appears only if the value is non-zero.

Example usage:

You can find my zshrc and more dot files that I use in my Pages/My dot files

Filed by kargig at 12:32 under Linux,MacOSX
Tags: exit codes, Linux, prompt, zsh
No Comments | 13,265 views

The Task
Last year, me and comzeradd set up a Gentoo server for HELLUG according to our plot to help Gentoo conquer the world. Unfortunately Gentoo is out of HELLUG’s administration policy, all servers must be Debian. We didn’t know that, so after a small flame :), we decided that we should take back the server to somebody’s home and re-install Debian over it, the problem was that the server was located at University of Athens campus which is a bit far from downtown Athens where comzeradd lives. I also live 500km away so we were pretty much stuck. Months passed and nobody actually had enough free time to go to UOA‘s campus and take the server to their house. …In the meantime manji joined us as an extra root for the server.

One Saturday night while chatting at IRC (what else could we be doing on saturday night ??) we had an inspiration, why not install Debian remotely, without taking the server home. Even if everything got eventually borked it couldn’t get any worse than going there, taking the server home and fixing it, just like we would do any way. So we gathered on a new IRC channel with some more friends that are really good with Debian and started the conversion progress.

The Server
The interesting part about the server was that it had 2x250Gb IDE disks. The Gentoo setup had these disks partitioned to 4 software raid devices + swap partitions.
(more…)

Filed by kargig at 20:21 under Gentoo,Linux
Tags: debian, debootstrap, Gentoo, grub, HOWTO, mdadm, no psysical access, raid, raid0, raid1, remote install
11 Comments | 21,043 views