My Personal Linux Cheat-sheet: Files & Storage

1. Search files by content or filename
1. Full-text search in a folder and its subfolders: grep -rn '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'
2. Fast global search by filename: updatedb; locate [FILENAME]

2. What to do when my disk is almost full?
1. How to check disk usage interactively: ncdu -x /
2. Get disk usage of all folders and files in current pwd: du -sh * | sort -hr
3. Get top 20 largest files/folders on the disk: du -h /* | sort -hr | head -20
4. Lower the 5% reserved space to 2% on disk: tune2fs -m2 /dev/sda3 (-m2 is for 2% space)
5. Clear nginx logs without reload: truncate --size 0 /var/log/nginx/error.log
6. Purge all rotated nginx logs which is more than 2 days old: find /var/log/nginx -maxdepth 1 -mtime +1 -name "*.log-*" -delete

3. Rename all files with “*.log-20211122*” to “*.log-20211121*” find . -name '*.log-20211122*' -exec bash -c 'mv $0 ${0/20211122/20211121}' {} \\;

4. “z-command”: manipulate gzipped files without extracting them.
1. zcat for cat to view compressed file
2. zgrep for grep to search inside the compressed file
3. zless for less, zmore for more, to view the file in pages
4. zdiff for diff to see the difference between two compressed files

5. Generate a random file with specified size: head -c 100M </dev/urandom >my_random_file

Format a new disk in Linux

Create partition table & create partition

$ parted -l	  # get disk logical name: /dev/vdb
$ parted /dev/vdb mklabel gpt
$ parted -a optimal /dev/vdb mkpart
partition name? (empty)
file system? ext4
start? 0%
end? 100%

Format this partition

$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdb1		# format disk

Mount this partition

$ lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,UUID	  # check partition UUID
$ nano /etc/fstab

UUID=9c9dee37-122b-4a78-9a85-968c72816dee /data ext4 defaults 1 2

$ mkdir /data
$ mount -a	# apply /etc/fstab