Table of Contents

About

directory management with bash.

Structure

File System Hierarchy Standard (FHS)

Management

Current

See How you can work in Bash with the working directory (ie current, PWD, OLDPWD)

Get

the space by directory recursively

To get the space by directory, you can use the du command. It summarize disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories.

With a redirection, you can export the result and find the directories that used the most space. 

du mydirectory > du.csv

the space for one directory

For one directory: 

du -hs

13G

where the options mean:

  • s: summary
  • h: human readable

the top disk usage by directory

The following command gives the top 10 subdirectory from the current directory by disk usage. 

du | grep logs | sort -n | cut -f 2- | while read a; do du -sh "$a"; done | tail

3.3M    ./instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs/OracleBIJavaHostComponent
6.3M    ./instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs/OPMN/opmn
6.3M    ./instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs/OPMN
14M     ./instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1
14M     ./instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent
25M     ./instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs
40M     ./Oracle_BI1/cfgtoollogs/oui
40M     ./oracle_common/cfgtoollogs/oui
40M     ./oracle_common/cfgtoollogs
40M     ./Oracle_BI1/cfgtoollogs

where:

  • du list the subdirectory with the disk usage
  • grep filters the result for only the logs subdirectory
  • sort sort the result
  • tail shows only the 10 last lines

For OBI: 

$fmw_home/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs
$fmw_home/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/bi_server1/logs
$fmw_home/instances/instance1/diagnostics/logs/OracleBIServerComponent/coreapplication_obis1

Loop through children

  • files: The * glob expansion is why this loop iterates over a list of files.
#!/bin/bash
for filename in /$baseDir/dirPath/*.txt; do
    echo $filename
done
  • directory
for childPath in /my/directory/path/*; do
    if [ -d "$childPath" ]; then
      REPO_DIRS+=("$childPath")
    fi
done

Check if a path is a directory

if [ -d /my/path ]; then
  echo 'This is a directory'
else
  echo 'This is not a directory'
fi

Check if a directory is not empty

if [ -n "$(ls -A "$GDRIVE_MOUNT_PATH")" ]; then
    echo_err "Google Drive Mount Directory ($GDRIVE_MOUNT_PATH) is not empty."
    exit 1
fi

make a zip file

see also: zip 

tar -pczf myDirectory.tar.gz myDirectory/

move a directory

mv /path/to/source /path/to/dest

where:

  • mv = move Rename SOURCE to DEST, or move SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY.

Transfer a directory

Transferring folders

  • rsync
  • or with the following pipeline (compress, buffer, transfer and uncompress)
tar cf - [source-path] | mbuffer -m 1024M | ssh [server] '(cd /[destination-path]; tar xf -)'

copy a directory

cp -r /Path/To/sourceDirectory /Path/To/TargetDirectory

where:

  • cp = copy
  • r = recursive

It will create the target directory.

Delete a directory

  • Remove an empty directory
rmdir directoryName
  • Remove a directory and all sub without prompting
rm -rf letters/

Tip using rm with a variable should use the following expression to avoid deleting your whole disk if the variable my_variable is empty or not set 

rm -rf "${my_variable:?}"/*

Rename a directory

mv myDirectoryName MyNewDirectoryName

Create directory

  • With parent
mkdir -p  /parentDoesnExist/myDir