Hi I've got lots of folders with the name "#eaDir" all across one of my disks and I'd like to search through, find all of them and delete them and their contents.
I know this is probably a combination of the find and rm command but I can't quite figure them out. Can anyone help?
Try this:
find . -type d -name '#eaDir' -print0 | xargs -rt0 rm -rv
Here's the same thing but using explicit long options for xargs:
find . -type d -name '#eaDir' -print0 | xargs --no-run-if-empty --verbose --null rm -rv
(using long options is always a good idea if you're writing scripts that will need to be maintained/reviewed by other people)
But before anything else:
man find
man xargs
find /path/to/the/disk -type d -name "#eaDir" -delete
Notice that the order here is fundamental: quoting the manpage,
Warnings: Don't forget that the find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.
So, as always, first try your find command with -print, then, when you checked that everything works fine, replace it with -delete. Notice that -delete implies -depth, so, to do meaningful testing with -print, you should explicitly specify it in the expression:
When testing a find command line that you later intend to use with -delete, you should explicitly specify -depth in order to avoid later surprises.
Goto root folder or directory and execute the following command:
find . -path '*/#eaDir/*' -delete -print && find . -path '*/#eaDir' -delete -print
This should work for you.
Related
I have this find command and need to make it work recursively in the current directory ( at the moment it searches all the files on the disk )
find . -name ‘OldName*’ -print0 | xargs -0 rename -S ‘OldName’ ‘NewName’
Any idea how to make it search in the current directory that I am navigated to in terminal ?
Would this work?
find . -name 'OldName' -exec rename -n 'OldName' 'NewName' \;
I have a directory (for Endnote) that is filled with PDF files (1000's of them). I have used Unix to print a list of all of the pdf files and saved this list as a text file. Most of these pdf files are located in other directories throughout my computer (duplicates).
Now, I want to use the find command to search for duplicates of these pdf files throughout the rest of my computer and if a duplicate is found, move it to a new directory. If a specific file name is found more than once, I want to give each a unique name (ie basename.pdf.1, basename.pdf.2 etc). At the end, I want a single directory for all duplicates so I can double check them and then delete).
However, I do not want find to search the directory in which my list was made from or my Dropbox, as I do not want to move these pdf files (only move the other pdfs scattered throughout my computer).
I have found (I think) how to do all of the individual steps that I need to complete this task, but I cannot seem to put everything together into a working Unix command.
1) In order to find files while excluding a directory:
find -name "what to search for" -not -path "excluded_directory"
or
find build -not \( -path excluded_directory1 -prune \) -not \( -path excluded_directory2 -prune \) -name \*.what_to_find
or my current favorite
find . -name '*.what_to_find' | grep -v exludeddir1 | grep -v excludeddir2
2) In order to read a text file into find and use the lines as search patterns:
find . type f -print | fgrep -f file_list.txt
3) to find and move files
find / -iname "*.what_to_find" -type f -exec mv {} /new_directory \;
or
find / -iname "*.what_to_find" -type f | xargs -I '{}' /new_directory
or (to rename files so files with same name are not just overwritten by each other). I haven't quite figured everything going on in this command out yet...
find -name '*.what_to_find' -type f -exec bash -c 'mv -v "$0" "./$( mktemp "$( basename "$0" ).XXX" )"' '{}' \;
So, I can execute this commands individually, but have not been able to get them to work together as desired (maybe my order of commands is wrong? other problems?).
find . type f -print | fgrep -f file_list.txt | grep -v excludeddir1 | grep -v excludeddir2 -exec bash -c 'echo mv -v "$0" "./$( mktemp "$( basename "$0" ).XXX" )"' '{}' \;
Any help is much appreciated!
Thanks,
Derrick
Well I wasn't able to complete this task exactly how I wanted to, but I found a work around that got the job done.
I printed a list of all PDFs I have in Endnote, then deleted the path name, leaving just the file names (find and replace function in text wrangler). I then used the find command to search this list against my computer, printing all occurances of each PDF.
Then in text wrangler, I deleted all lines containing the initial path to my endnote PDFs, leaving just the desired duplicates.
Next, I used the find command to search for these exact paths and move them to a new folder.
All In all, I got by with the exact same commands I have in my original post, and a little help from text wrangler. Unfortunately I never figured out how to combine all my desired steps into a single unix command.
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
' \;
On the UNIX bash shell (specifically Mac OS X Leopard) what would be the simplest way to copy every file having a specific extension from a folder hierarchy (including subdirectories) to the same destination folder (without subfolders)?
Obviously there is the problem of having duplicates in the source hierarchy. I wouldn't mind if they are overwritten.
Example: I need to copy every .txt file in the following hierarchy
/foo/a.txt
/foo/x.jpg
/foo/bar/a.txt
/foo/bar/c.jpg
/foo/bar/b.txt
To a folder named 'dest' and get:
/dest/a.txt
/dest/b.txt
In bash:
find /foo -iname '*.txt' -exec cp \{\} /dest/ \;
find will find all the files under the path /foo matching the wildcard *.txt, case insensitively (That's what -iname means). For each file, find will execute cp {} /dest/, with the found file in place of {}.
The only problem with Magnus' solution is that it forks off a new "cp" process for every file, which is not terribly efficient especially if there is a large number of files.
On Linux (or other systems with GNU coreutils) you can do:
find . -name "*.xml" -print0 | xargs -0 echo cp -t a
(The -0 allows it to work when your filenames have weird characters -- like spaces -- in them.)
Unfortunately I think Macs come with BSD-style tools. Anyone know a "standard" equivalent to the "-t" switch?
The answers above don't allow for name collisions as the asker didn't mind files being over-written.
I do mind files being over-written so came up with a different approach. Replacing each / in the path with - keep the hierarchy in the names, and puts all the files in one flat folder.
We use find to get the list of all files, then awk to create a mv command with the original filename and the modified filename then pass those to bash to be executed.
find ./from -type f | awk '{ str=$0; sub(/\.\//, "", str); gsub(/\//, "-", str); print "mv " $0 " ./to/" str }' | bash
where ./from and ./to are directories to mv from and to.
If you really want to run just one command, why not cons one up and run it? Like so:
$ find /foo -name '*.txt' | xargs echo | sed -e 's/^/cp /' -e 's|$| /dest|' | bash -sx
But that won't matter too much performance-wise unless you do this a lot or have a ton of files. Be careful of name collusions, however. I noticed in testing that GNU cp at least warns of collisions:
cp: will not overwrite just-created `/dest/tubguide.tex' with `./texmf/tex/plain/tugboat/tubguide.tex'
I think the cleanest is:
$ find /foo -name '*.txt' | xargs -i cp {} /dest
Less syntax to remember than the -exec option.
As far as the man page for cp on a FreeBSD box goes, there's no need for a -t switch. cp will assume the last argument on the command line to be the target directory if more than two names are passed.