Usefull Commands: Files & Archives

Extract only one subdirectory and all its sub-content:

tar -xvzf my-archive.tar.gz --wildcards "./directory/subdirectory*"

Extract all .gz files in the current folder:
```
gunzip ./*.gz
```
Extract .tar.bz2 file:
```
tar xvjf ./file.tar.bz2
```
Create a .zip archive of current directory, including all sub-dirs:
```
zip -r archive.zip ./*
```
Create a 7-Zip archive (thanks to p7zip) of a folder, including all sub-directories:
```
7za a archive.7z ./folder
```
Do the same as above, but split the archive in 50 Mib volumes:
```
7za a -v50m archive.7z ./folder
```

Convert .tar.gz file to .tar.bz2 file:

gzip -dc archive.tar.gz | bzip2 > archive.tar.bz2

Case insensitive search from the current folder of all files that have the string dummy in their filename:
```
find ./ -iname "*dummy*"
```
Recursive and case insensitive content search on non-binary files from the current folder:
```
grep -RiI "string to search" ./*
```
Get the list of the latest 10 modified files in the current folder tree:
```
find ./ -printf "%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n" | sort | tail -n10
```

Same as above but sorted by latest access time:

find ./ -printf "%AY-%Am-%Ad %AT %p\n" | sort | tail -n10

Rename all mp3 files in the current folder by adding a “sub-extension”:
```
rename "s/\.mp3/\.my-sub-extension\.mp3/g" *.mp3
```
Convert all files in the current folder to lower case:
```
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *
```

Delete all .pyc and .pyo files in the system:
```
find / -name "*.py[co]" | xargs rm
```
Delete all empty files and folders (I don’t know why, but I need to run this command several times to delete all empty folders):
```
find ./* -empty -print -exec rm -rf "{}" \;
```

I used those commands when I import big quantity of files from a window user:

find ./* -name "desktop.ini" -print -exec rm -f "{}" \;
find ./* -name "Thumbs.db" -print -exec rm -f "{}" \;

Delete all files and folders in the current directory except the README.txt file:
```
ls ./ -I "README.txt" | xargs rm -rf
```