I was trying to remove all git files from a repository with this:
find . -name ".git*" -exec rm -rf {} \;
However, rm warns that files could not be deleted (because their parent directory has already been deleted).
Is there a way to get find to stop recursing when it finds a matching directory?
E.g. find...
/.gitmodules
/.git/stuff
/.git/.gitfile
... produces
/.gitmodules
/.git
Use -depth:
find . -depth -name ".git*" -exec rm -rf {} \;
This would allow you to process the files or subdirectories first before their parent directories.
Related
I have a directory structure like this
/home
/dir-1
some-file.php
/dir-2
sibling.php
target-file.php
/dir-3
/dir-4
other-sibling.php
sibling.php
target-file.php
/dir-5
target-file.php
I need to target all directories containing the file "target-file.php" and remove those directories with its contents. In my structure, the final result wanted is:
/home
/dir-1
some-file.php
/dir-3
I am trying:
rm -rf /home/*/target-file.php
But it is only removing that file (target-file.php) and not the siblings or the parent directory.
Please help
Use this:
#!/bin/bash
find . -type f -name target-file.php -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' line
do
echo "$line"
/bin/rm -fr "$(dirname "$line")"
done
Using find with while like this ensure it will work with all filenames (see https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/001).
You can run find . -type f -name target-file.php -print to see the list of files.
dirname removes the filename so you are left with only the directory names.
/bin/rm -fr deletes the directories.
you can comment the echo line, this was just to show you the files / directories being processed.
I have a directory that contains multiple files and directories and i wanted to delete all the content and exclude one subdirectory; what i did was:
rm -rf * --exclude='directorytokeep'
it worked halfway throu the rm command but once it reached the directory i wanna keep it didn't go after the other files and directories.
thank you
Please test first with
find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name directorytokeep -exec echo rm -rf {} \;
before removing the echo in the command.
I have a folder named "in" that contains several folders "a" "b" "c" and I want to move all files to thhe folder "proc" and compress them. The tricky part is the files in "in/a" have to be moved to "proc/a", "in/b" have to be moved to "proc/b" and so on
I managed to find all files and zip them whit this command
find . -type f ! \( -name "*gz" -o -name "*tmp" -o -name "*xftp" \) -exec gzip -n '{}' \;
But I'm not finding a generic command to move the files that works whiteout me telling the name of the folders. Can anyone give me a hand?
Well I ended up finding out I had a couple more problems for example the target folder not existing so I ended up using this code
find . -type f ! \( -name "*gz" -o -name "*tmp" -o -name "*xftp" \) -exec gzip -n '{}' \;
find . -name "*.gz" | cpio -p -dumv $1
if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
find . -name "*.gz" -exec rm -rf {} \;
else
echo "cpio Failed!" 1>&2
exit 1
fi
the 1st line finds all files to be processed and zips them.
the second line finds all files and copies to the target dir, in my case it was $1 (argument 1), creating as many folders as necessary to ensure the same structure.
The third line checks the status of the last command if it worked it finds and removes all gz files from the source folder whiteout deleting any folder. If it didn't deletes nothing so I can analyse what happened (maybe run out of space)
I bet there's a faster way of doing this whiteout having to use so much disk space but since that was not a problem for me it looks acceptable.
I have hundreds of directories and files in one directory.
What is the best way deleting only directories (no matter if the directories have anything in it or not, just delete them all)
Currently I use ls -1 -d */, and record them in a file, and do sed, and then run it. It rather long way. I'm looking for better way deleting only directories
To delete all directories and subdirectories and leave only files in the working directory, I have found this concise command works for me:
rm -r */
It makes use of bash wildcard */ where star followed by slash will match only directories and subdirectories.
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d
then
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -exec rm -rf '{}' \;
To add an explanation:
find starts in the current directory due to . and stays within the current directory only with -maxdepth and -mindepth both set to 1. -type d tells find to only match on things that are directories.
find also has an -exec flag that can pass its results to another function, in this case rm. the '{}' \; is the way these results are passed. See this answer for a more complete explanation of what {} and \; do
First, run:
find /path -d -type d
to make sure the output looks sane, then:
find /path -d -type d -exec rm -rf '{}' \;
-type d looks only for directories, then -d makes sure to put child directories before the parent.
Simple way :-
rm -rf `ls -d */`
find command only (it support file deletion)\
find /path -depth -type d -delete
-type d looks only for directories, then -depth makes sure to put child directories before the parent. -delete removing filtered files/folders
In one line:
rm -R `ls -1 -d */`
(backquotes)
I'm trying to remove all the .svn directories from a working directory.
I thought I would just use find and rm like this:
find . -iname .svn -exec 'rm -rf {}' \;
But the result is:
find: rm -rf ./src/.svn: No such file or directory
Obviously the file exists, or find wouldn't find it... What am I missing?
You shouldn't put the rm -rf {} in single quotes.
As you've quoted it the shell is treating all of the arguments to -exec it as a command rather than a command plus arguments, so it's looking for a file called "rm -rf ./src/.svn" and not finding it.
Try:
find . -iname .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;
Just by-the-bye, you should probably get out of the habit of using -exec for things that can be done to multiple files at once. For instance, I would write that out of habit as
find . -iname .svn -print | xargs rm -rf
or, since I'm now using a Macintosh and more likely to encounter file or directory names with spaces in them
find . -iname .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
"xargs" makes sure that "rm" is invoked only once every "N" files, where "N" is usually 20. That's not a huge win in this case, because rm is small, but if the program you wanted to execute on every file was large or did a lot of processing on start up, it could make things a lot faster.
maybe its just me, but the old find & rm script does not work on my current config, a la:
find /data/bin/test -type d -mtime +10 -name "[0-9]*" -exec rm -rf {} \;
whereas the xargs solution does, a la:
find /data/bin/test -type d -mtime +10 -name '[0-9]*' -print | xargs rm -rf ;
no idea why, but i've updated my scriptLib so i dont spend another couple hours beating
my head on something so simple....
(running RHEL under kernel-2.6.18-194.11.3.el5)
EDIT: found out why - my RHEL distro defaults vi to insert the dreaded cr into line breaks (whch breaks the command) - following suggestions from nx5000 & jliagre at linuxquestions.org, added the following to ~/.vimrc:
:set fileformat=unix
map <F4> :set fileformat=unix<CR>
map <F5> :set fileformat=dos<CR>
which allows the behavior to pivot on the F4/F5.
to check whether CR's are embedded in your file:
head -1 scriptFile.sh | od -c | head -1
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/bad-interpreter-no-such-file-or-directory-213617/
You can also use the svn command as follows:
svn export <url-to-repo> <dest-path>
Look here for more info.
Try
find . -iname .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;
and that probably ought to work IIRC.
You can pass anything you want in quotes, with the following trick.
find . -iname .svn -exec bash -c 'rm -rf {}' \;
The exec option will be happy to see that you're simply calling an executable with an argument, but your argument will be able to contain a script of basically any size and shape.
find . -iname .svn -exec bash -c '
ls -l "{}" | wc -l
' \;