I'm trying to use find to remove all files under cache directories in a web hosted environment.
find /home/hosted -maxdepth 2 -type d -name "cache" -print -exec rm -rf "{}/*" \;
I've tried several variations of this, but for some reason find won't remove the cache/* files. Anyone see anything I'm missing?
Thanks
Arguments for -exec don't get expanded as you expect. That is because -exec calls execve() directly and thus * does not get expanded to all files in a matching directory. If you want to have shell expansion, you have to feed -exec with /bin/sh (or a shell of your choice), like this:
find /your/dir -name "cache" -type d -maxdepth 2 -print -exec sh -c "rm -f {}/*" \;
Related
At the moment I recursively remove all softlinks from my current working directory like this:
find . -type l -delete
But I don't want to remove symlinks pointing to a directory anymore.
Is there simple way to customize the find command or do I have to omit the -delete and script something to inspect every found softlink "myself" before removing?
As already suggested in the comments, you can use the test utility for this; but you don't need readlink because test -d always resolves symbolic links.
# replace -print with -exec rm {} +
find . -type l ! -exec test -d {} \; -print
It might be slow due to the overhead from spawning a new process for each symlink though. If that's a problem, you can incorporate a small shell script in your find command to process them in bulks.
find . -type l -exec sh -c '
for link; do
shift
if ! test -d "$link"; then
set "$#" "$link"
fi
done
# remove echo
echo rm "$#"' sh {} +
Or, if you have GNU find installed, you can utilize the -xtype primary.
# replace -print with -delete
find -type l ! -xtype d -print
My folder structure looks like this:
|-20200912
-fringe
-other
|-20200915
-fringe
-other
...
And I want to delete the content of all folders called "fringe". How could I achieve this with one command?
I thought about something like this in pseudocode:
find . -name "fringe" -type d -exec rm <content>
You were close.
find . -name 'fringe' -type d -exec rm -rf {} +
This removes every directory named fringe and everything within them.
Single vs double quotes don't make a difference here, but generally prefer single quotes if you mean to pass something in verbatim (with the possible exception of when the thing you want to pass in contains literal single quotes).
If you want to remove the directory's contents, try
... -execdir sh -c 'rm '*' \;
You are looking to process the files and not the directory through rm and so I would use a regex that searches for for files with fringe in the directory path.
find -regex "^.*/fringe/.*$" -type f -exec rm '{}' \;
I would change the rm to ls to ensure that the results are expected before running the actual rm.
You can force gobbing in the exec command:
find -name fringe -type d -execdir sh -c 'rm {}/*' \;
UPDATE 2014-03-21
So I realized I wasn't as efficient as I could be, as all the disks that I needed to "scrub" were under /media and named "disk1, disk2,disk3, etc." Here's the final script:
DIRTY_DIR="/media/disk*"
find $DIRTY_DIR -depth -type d -name .AppleDouble -exec rm -rf {} \;
find $DIRTY_DIR -depth -type d -name .AppleDB -exec rm -rf {} \;
find $DIRTY_DIR -depth -type d -name .AppleDesktop -exec rm -rf {} \;
find $DIRTY_DIR -type f -name ".*DS_Store" -exec rm -f {} \;
find $DIRTY_DIR -type f -name ".Thumbs.db" -exec rm -f {} \; # I know, I know, this is a Windows file.
Next will probably to just clean up the code even more, and add features like logging and reporting results (through e-mail or otherwise); excluding system and directories; and allowing people to customize the list of files/directories.
Thanks for all the help!
UPDATE
Before I incorporated the helpful suggestions provided by everyone, I performed some tests, the results of which were very interesting (see below).
As a test, I ran this command:
root#doi:~# find /media/disk3 -type d -name .AppleDouble -exec echo rm -rf {} \;
The results (which is what I expected):
rm -rf /media/disk3/Videos/Chorus/.AppleDouble
However, when I ran the actual command (without echo):
root#doi:~# find /media/disk3 -type d -name .AppleDouble -exec rm -rf {} \;
I received the same "error" output:
find: `/media/disk3/Videos/Chorus/.AppleDouble': No such file or directory
I put "error" in quotes because obviously the folder was removed, as verified by immediately running:
root#doi:~# find /media/disk3 -type d -name .AppleDouble -exec rm -rf {} \;
root#doi:~#
It seems like the find command stored the original results, acted on it by deleting the directory, but then tried to delete it again? Or is the -f option of rm, which is supposed to be for ignoring nonexistent files and arguments, is ignored? I note that when I run tests with the rm command alone without the find command, everything worked as expected. Thus, directly running rm -rf ... \nonexistent_directory, no errors were returned even though the "non_existent_directory" was not there, and directly running rm -r \nonexistent_directory provided the expected:
rm: cannot remove 'non_existent_directory': No such file or directory
Should I use the -delete option instead of the -exec rm ... option? I had wanted to make the script as broadly applicable as possible for systems that didn't have -delete option for find.
Lastly, I don't presume it matters if /media/disk1, /media/disk2, ... are combined in an AUFS filesystem under /media/storage as the find command is operating on the individual disks themselves?
Thanks for all the help so far, guys. I'll publish the script when I'm done.
ORIGINAL POST
I'm writing a bash script to delete a few OS X remnants on my Lubuntu file shares. However, when executing this:
...
BASE_DIR="/media/disk" # I have 4 disks: disk1, disk2, ...
COUNTER=1
while [ $COUNTER -lt 5 ]; do # Iterate through disk1, disk2, ...
DIRTY_DIR=${BASE_DIR}$COUNTER # Look under the current disk counter /media/disk1, /media/disk2, ...
find $DIRTY_DIR -name \.AppleDouble -exec rm -rf {} \; # Delete all .AppleDouble directories
find $DIRTY_DIR -name ".*DS_Store" -exec rm -rf {} \; # Delete all .DS_Store and ._.DS_Store files
COUNTER=$(($COUNTER+1))
done
...
I see the following output:
find: /media/disk1/Pictures/.AppleDouble: No such file or directory
Before I added the -exec rm ... portion the script found the /media/disk1/Pictures/.AppleDouble directory. The script works properly for removing DS_Store files, but what am I missing for the find command for directories?
I'm afraid to screw too much with the -exec portion as I don't want to obliterate directories in error.
tl;dr - Pass -prune if you're deleting directories using find.
For anyone else who stumbles on this question. Running an example like this
find /media/disk3 -type d -name .AppleDouble -exec rm -rf {} \;
results in an error like
rm: cannot remove 'non_existent_directory': No such file or directory
When finding and deleting directories with find, you'll often encounter this error because find stores the directory to process subdirectories, then deletes it with exec, then tries to traverse the subdirectories which no longer exist.
You can either pass -maxdepth 0 or -prune to prevent this issue. Like so:
find /media/disk3 -type d -name .AppleDouble -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;
Now it deletes the directories without any errors. Hurray! :)
You don't need to escape DOT in shell glob as this is not regex. So use .AppleDouble instead of \.AppleDouble:
find $DIRTY_DIR -name .AppleDouble -exec rm -rf '{}' \;
PS: I don't see anywhere $COUNTER being incremented in your script.
I want to rename all .hg_gg folders in /var/www to .hg. How can I do it?
I know how to rename .hg to .hg_gg.
find /var/www -name ".hg" -exec bash -c 'mv $0 $0_gg' {} \;
but don't know how to make reverse change.
Try this:
find /var/www -name ".hg_gg" -execdir bash -c 'mv {} .hg' \;
You need to use a special syntax defined by find: {} is the placeholder for the current file name. Check the man page for that. Also it is important to use -execdir instead of -exec. execdir changes the current working directory to the folder where the found directory is located. Otherwise it would do something like this mv /var/www/.hg_gg ./.hg
You can speed up things a bit when restricting find to find folders only using -type d:
find /var/www -type d -name ".hg_gg" -execdir bash -c 'mv {} .hg' \;
Consider this find command with -execdir and -prune options:
find /var/www/ -type d -name ".hg_gg" -execdir mv '{}' '.gg' \; -prune
-execdir will execute the command in each subdirectory
-prune causes find to not descend into the current file
Not a one liner, but you could do this:
for file in `find /var/www -name ".hg_gg"`; do
mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/hg_gg$/hg/'`
done
I'm on a linux system I wonder what is wrong with the following execution of find:
mkdir a && touch a/b
find . -name a -type d -exec echo '{}' \;
./a
find . -name a -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;
find: `./a': No such file or directory
The invocation of echo is just for testing purposes. I would expect the last command to remove the directory './a' entirely and return 0. Instead it removes the directory and generates the error message. To repeat, it does remove the directory! What is going on?
rm executes without a problem. The issue is that find is confused, since it knew the directory ./a was there, it tries to visit that directory to look for directories named a. However, find cannot enter the directory, since it was already removed.
One way to avoid this is to do
find -name a -type d | xargs rm -r
This will let the find move along before the rm command is executed. Or, you can simply ignore the error in your original command.
Based on epsalon's comment the solution is to use the -depth option which causes the deeper files to be visited first.
find . -depth -name a -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;
does the trick. Thanks a bunch!
If performance is an issue, use -prune in order to prevent find from descending into directories named "a":
find . -name a -type d -prune -exec rm -r '{}' \;