Delete files in one directory that do not exist in another directory or its child directories - linux

Question

I am still a newbie in shell scripting and trying to come up with a simple code. Could anyone give me some direction here. Here is what I need.
Files in path 1: /tmp
100abcd
200efgh
300ijkl
Files in path2: /home/storage
backupfile_100abcd_str1
backupfile_100abcd_str2
backupfile_200efgh_str1
backupfile_200efgh_str2
backupfile_200efgh_str3
Now I need to delete file 300ijkl in /tmp as the corresponding backup file is not present in /home/storage. The /tmp file contains more than 300 files. I need to delete the files in /tmp for which the corresponding backup files are not present and the file names in /tmp will match file names in /home/storage or directories under /home/storage.
Appreciate your time and response.

Answer 1

You can also approach the deletion using grep as well. You can loop though the files in /tmp checking with ls piped to grep, and deleting if there is not a match:
#!/bin/bash
[ -z "$1" -o -z "$2" ] && { ## validate input
printf "error: insufficient input. Usage: %s tmpfiles storage\n" ${0//*\//}
exit 1
}
for i in "$1"/*; do
fn=${i##*/} ## strip path, leaving filename only
## if file in backup matches filename, skip rest of loop
ls "${2}"* | grep -q "$fn" &>/dev/null && continue
printf "removing %s\n" "$i"
# rm "$i" ## remove file
done
Note: the actual removal is commented out above, test and insure there are no unintended consequences before preforming the actual delete. Call it passing the path to tmp (without trailing /) as the first argument and with /home/storage as the second argument:
$ bash scriptname /path/to/tmp /home/storage

Answer 2

You can solve this by
making a list of the files in /home/storage
testing each filename in /tmp to see if it is in the list from /home/storage
Given the linux+shell tags, one might use bash:
make the list of files from /home/storage an associative array
make the subscript of the array the filename
Here is a sample script to illustrate ($1 and $2 are the parameters to pass to the script, i.e., /home/storage and /tmp):
#!/bin/bash
declare -A InTarget
while read path
do
name=${path##*/}
InTarget[$name]=$path
done < <(find $1 -type f)
while read path
do
name=${path##*/}
[[ -z ${InTarget[$name]} ]] && rm -f $path
done < <(find $2 -type f)
It uses two interesting shell features:
name=${path##*/} is a POSIX shell feature which allows the script to perform the basename function without an extra process (per filename). That makes the script faster.
done < <(find $2 -type f) is a bash feature which lets the script read the list of filenames from find without making the assignments to the array run in a subprocess. Here the reason for using the feature is that if the array is updated in a subprocess, it would have no effect on the array value in the script which is passed to the second loop.
For related discussion:
Extract File Basename Without Path and Extension in Bash
Bash Script: While-Loop Subshell Dilemma

Answer 3

I spent some really nice time on this today because I needed to delete files which have same name but different extensions, so if anyone is looking for a quick implementation, here you go:
#!/bin/bash
# We need some reference to files which we want to keep and not delete,
 # let's assume you want to keep files in first folder with jpeg, so you
# need to map it into the desired file extension first.
FILES_TO_KEEP=`ls -1 ${2} | sed 's/\.pdf$/.jpeg/g'`
#iterate through files in first argument path
for file in ${1}/*; do
# In my case, I did not want to do anything with directories, so let's continue cycle when hitting one.
if [[ -d $file ]]; then
continue
fi
# let's omit path from the iterated file with baseline so we can compare it to the files we want to keep
NAME_WITHOUT_PATH=`basename $file`
 # I use mac which is equal to having poor quality clts
# when it comes to operating with strings,
# this should be safe check to see if FILES_TO_KEEP contain NAME_WITHOUT_PATH
if [[ $FILES_TO_KEEP == *"$NAME_WITHOUT_PATH"* ]];then
echo "Not deleting: $NAME_WITHOUT_PATH"
else
# If it does not contain file from the other directory, remove it.
echo "deleting: $NAME_WITHOUT_PATH"
rm -rf $file
fi
done
Usage: sh deleteDifferentFiles.sh path/from/where path/source/of/truth