I have many EC2 instances in a folder that I need to delete. Using -delete doesn't work because the directories are not empty. I tried looking for a way to get -rmdir -f to work with no success. The instance folders are all started with "i-" which led me to add wildcard "i-*" like that to get it to delete all directories starting with those characters. How can I manage to do this? the directories will never be empty either.
Assuming your current dir is the folder in question, how about:
find . -type d -name 'i-*'
If that lists the directories you want to remove, then change it to:
find . -type d -name 'i-*' -exec rm -r {} \;
In the command line interface/shell/born again shell/etc...
rm -r i-*
will remove ANY and ALL contained file(s) or directory(s) with subfiles and sub directories (recursive = -r) where the name begins with "i-" .
To delete the directories matching the pattern graphene-80* directly under /tmp, use
rm -rf /tmp/graphene-80*/
Here, the trailing / ensures that only directories whose names match the graphene-80* pattern are deleted (or symbolic links to directories), and not files etc.
To find the matching directories elsewhere under /tmp and delete them wherever they may be, use
find /tmp -type d -name 'graphene-80*' -prune -exec rm -rf {} +
To additionally see the names of the directories as they are deleted, insert -print before -exec.
The two tests -type d and -name 'graphene-80*' tests for directories with the names that we're looking for. The -prune removes the found directory from the search path (we don't want to look inside these directories as they are being deleted), and the -exec, finally, does the actual removal by means of calling rm.
Related
lets say I have a my_dirs/ directory, insdie that directory I have several parallel subdirectories which has several files and I want to delete all of them except the ones that have the substring '.regions'
this is my parent directory content:
this is what I tried:
shopt -s extglob
rm -r !(./**/*.regions*)
but I got an error message: cannot be deleted «! (./**/*. region *) »: The file or directory does not exist.
how can I do that?
First of all, always be careful when deleting multiple files.
The command to achieve what you want would be:
find my_dirs -type f ! -name "*.regions*" -delete
"-delete" must be last, otherwise it will delete everything it finds
This will explore all subdirectories in my_dirs, find the files (-type f) that not (!) contain ".regions" ("*.regions*") on their name, and delete (-delete) them.
I recommend running this first: find my_dirs -type f ! -name "*.regions*",
so it won't delete anything and you can check the files are correct.
Edit: Added -type f so it only targets files per Philippe's suggestion.
I have a question about removing some files out of several folders.
To be more specific: There are 5 Folders which are only the same by a few characters. For example: o1_FolderF_xy and zz_FolderF_34. And in each folder with the characters "FolderF" I want to delete all the files which starts with "filename".
The last time I did it by hand.
Will this work? Or do i need a script with a loop?
rm -rf /path/toFolder/*FolderF*/filename*
I'm sorry, I think for most it's a stupid question. But I'm new to all the stuff and I just do not want to go wrong with the delete
Your suggested command will work just fine.
You could use find instead:
find /path -name 'filename*' -exec rm {} \;
Basically it search's files with filename pattern on /path directory and for each file it executes rm.
Or, if you want to just check into those specific directories:
find /path -wholename '*folder*/filename*' -exec rm {} \;
I need to find all files in a directory and it's subdirectories, but I need to keep directory structure. For example there is a file
/media/subdir1/subdir2/file.jpg
and I want to copy it to
/new-media/subdir1/subdir2/file.jpg
and the same to all files inside /media/ directory. And by the way, directories inside /new-media/ must be created if not exist.
if I use
find /media/ -name '*.jpg' -exec cp /new-media/ ????? {} \;
how can I get all subdirectories inside /media/?
The above will get you everything in /media, but to get exactly what you want you probably want to use something like:
Method 1: Copy only what you need recursively, per your requirements:
mkdir ../media2; find . -name "*.jpg" -exec cp -r --parents {} ../media2 \;
I ran this from inside the directory you want to search recursively. It does a couple things:
1 - create the new destination directory
mkdir ../media2
2 - then finds all files ending with ".jpg" recursively.
find . -name "*.jpg"
3 - uses -exec to pass the copy command to each file returned to find as a match, and subs that in as the first argument (which with the syntax of cp, is going to be your source file):
-exec cp -r --parents {} ../media2 \;
the "--parents" flag retains existing directory structure and recursively creates subsequent parent directories. Super useful right?
Method 2: there might be a better way to do this with xargs, but the above ended up being the most simple method imho. That said, if you want to think outside the box, you could simply copy the entire directory over recursively, then remove anything NOT ending with ".jpg" with something like:
cp -r media media2; find ./media '!'-name "*.jpg" -type f | xargs rm
I think this is what you want:
cp -r /media /new-media
-R, -r, --recursive
copy directories recursively
Hope this helps.
I want to get a list of files that contain a given text within my file-system. Furthermore only files should be considdered that are located in a directoy given by a pattern.
So let´s say I have a number of directories called myDir within my filelsystem as shown here:
/usr
/myDir
/tmp
/myDir
/anotherDir
Now I want to get all the files within those directories that contain the text.
So basically I need to perform these steps:
loop all directories names myDir on the whole file-system
for every directory within that list get the files that contain the search-string
What I tried so far is find /etc /opt /tmp /usr /var -iname myDir -type d -exec ls -exec grep -l "SearchString" {} \;
However this doesn´t work as the results of find are directories which I may not use as input for grep. I assume I have to do one step in between the find and the grep but can´t find out how to do this.
I think I got it and will show you a little script that achieves what I need:
for i in $(find / -type d -iname myDir) do
for j in $(find "$i" -type f) do
grep "SearchString" "$j"
done
done
This will give me all the files that contain the SearchString and are located in any of the folders named myDir.
I have a directory named repository which has a number of files and sub directories. I want to find the files and directories which have not been modified since last 14 days so that I can delete those files and directories.
I have wrote this script but it is giving the directory name only
#!/bin/sh
M2_REPO=/var/lib/jenkins/.m2/repository
echo $M2_REPO
OLDFILES=/var/lib/jenkins/.m2/repository/deleted_artifacts.txt
AGE=14
find "${M2_REPO}" -name '*' -atime +${AGE} -exec dirname {} \; >> ${OLDFILES}
find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
Note that there are spaces between rm, {}, and \;
Explanation
The first argument is the path to the files. This can be a path, a directory, or a wildcard as in the example above. I would recommend using the full path, and make sure that you run the command without the exec rm to make sure you are getting the right results.
The second argument, -mtime, is used to specify the number of days old that the file is. If you enter +5, it will find files older than 5 days.
The third argument, -exec, allows you to pass in a command such as rm. The {} \; at the end is required to end the command.
This should work on Ubuntu, Suse, Redhat, or pretty much any version of linux.
You can give the find -delete flag to remove the files with it. Just be careful to put it in the end of the command so that the time filter is applied first.
You can first just list the files that the command finds:
find "${M2_REPO}" -depth -mtime +${AGE} -print
The -d flag makes the find do the search depth-first, which is implied by the -deletecommand.
If you like the results, change the print to delete:
find "${M2_REPO}" -mtime +${AGE} -delete
I know this is a very old question but FWIW I solved the problem in two steps, first find and delete files older than N days, then find and delete empty directories. I tried doing both in one step but the delete operation updates the modification time on the file's parent directory, and then the (empty) directory does not match the -mtime criteria any more! Here's the solution with shell variables:
age=14
dir="/tmp/dirty"
find "$dir" -mtime "+$age" -delete && find "$dir" -type d -empty -delete