I need to come up with a Bash script that will remove any folders within a directory if they meet both of the following criteria:
Older than 7 days.
Have an xml file in them that does not contain a certain string.
I know that this command works for removing all folders in the directory that are older than n days:
find ./ -type d -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {}\;
And this command removes all of the files named kittens.xml that don't have the string <claws>18</claws>:
find ./* -name "kittens.xml" -type f\! -exec grep -L "<claws>18</claws>" {} \;| xargs rm -fv
But how do I remove all the folders that are more than one week old and don't contain that string?
FYI, I have very little prior experience with Bash.
for dir in `find /WHERE/ARE/THOSE/DIRS -type d -mtime +7 2>/dev/null` ; do
fgrep '<claws>18</claws>' "${dir}/kittens.xml" &>/dev/null || rm -fv "${dir}"
done
It loops through the found directories, then checks via fgrep for the needed string in the file, and if it's not found (e.g. not in the file OR the file is missing), removes the dir.
Note: it might cause damage, so think before run it. I'd run it first like this so it shows what it would remove...
fgrep '<claws>18</claws>' "${dir}/kittens.xml" &>/dev/null || echo "rm -fv ${dir}"
Also if there are subdirs, it might cause problems.
Try using the grep v or --invert-match tags:
find ./* -name "kittens.xml" -type f\! -exec grep -L -v "<claws>18</claws>" {} \;| xargs rm -fv
You can find more about grep invert by using this in terminal:
grep --help | grep invert
Related
I have these bad data
AWS-Console.pngcrop-AWS-Console.png
Alimofire.pngcrop-Alimofire.png
Amazon-ECR-.pngcrop-Amazon-ECR-.png
Amazon-ECS.pngcrop-Amazon-ECS.png
Amazon-RDS.pngcrop-Amazon-RDS.png
Angular.pngcrop-Angular.png
AngularJS.pngcrop-AngularJS.png
.... 1000 more
I'm trying to delete them
I've tried
ls public/assets/fe/img/skill/ | grep crop | rm -rf *crop*
ls public/assets/fe/img/skill/ | grep crop | rm -rf
rm -rf $(ls public/assets/fe/img/skill/ | grep crop)
None of them work ...
rm can handle the glob expressions that ls handles:
rm public/assets/fe/img/skill/*crop*
Use the find command instead
find . -name "*crop*" -type f -exec rm -i {} \;
-type f will specify to search file only and avoid directories
-exec requires the command input to end with \;, the {} being substitute by the result of the command
the -i will ask you to confirm ; remove it once sure what you do.
advice display the result beforehand with -print in place of -exec ...
find . -name "*crop*" -type f -print
More here where your question would find more accurate answers
The main problem in your commands is the missing path in the output of the ls command.
ls public/assets/fe/img/skill/ | grep crop will retur e.g. AWS-Console.pngcrop-AWS-Console.png which is passed to rm. But rm AWS-Console.pngcrop-AWS-Console.png fails because there is no such file in the current directory. It should be rm public/assets/fe/img/skill/AWS-Console.pngcrop-AWS-Console.png instead.
Adding -d to the ls command should do the trick:
ls -d public/assets/fe/img/skill/ | grep crop | rm -rf
rm -rf $(ls -d public/assets/fe/img/skill/ | grep crop)
As pointed out in other answers, other solutions exist, including:
rm public/assets/fe/img/skill/*crop*
find public/assets/fe/img/skill/ -name "*crop*" -type f -exec rm -i {} \;
If it's a really large number of files (apparently wasn't in your case), xargs can speed up the process. This applies for a lot of things you might want to read from a pipe.
find . -name "*crop*" -type f | xargs rm
The main advantage of using find here is that it's an easy way to ignore directories. If that's not an issue, let the OS handle all that.
printf "%s\n" public/assets/fe/img/skill/*crop* | xargs rm
If you need to be able to pick up files in subdirectories -
shopt -s globstar # double asterisks not include arbitrary preceding paths
printf "%s\n" public/assets/fe/img/skill/**crop* | xargs rm
You might want to look over the list first, though.
printf "%s\n" public/assets/fe/img/skill/*crop* >crop.lst
# check the list - vi, grep, whatever satisfies you.
xargs rm < crop.lst # fast-delete them in bulk
Iam using centos 7
If I want to find files that have specific name and specific date then moving these files to another folder iam issuing the command
find -name 'fsimage*' | xargs ls -ali | grep 'Oct 20' | -exec mv {} /hdd/fordelete/ \;
with the following error
-bash: -exec: command not found xargs: ls: terminated by signal 13
As another answer already explains, -exec is an action for find, you can't use it as a shell command. On contrary, xargs and grep are commands, and you can't use them as find actions, just like you can't use pipe | inside find.
But more importantly, even though you could use ls and grep on find's result just to move files older than some amount of time, you shouldn't. Such pipeline is fragile and fails on many corner cases, like symlinks, files with newlines in name, etc.
Instead, use find. You'll find it quite powerful.
For example, to mv files modified more than 7 days ago, use the -mtime test:
find -name 'fsimage*' -mtime +7 -exec mv '{}' /some/dir/ \;
To mv files modified on a specific/reference date, e.g. 2017-10-20, you can use the -newerXY test:
find -name 'fsimage*' -newermt 2017-10-20 ! -newermt 2017-10-21 -exec mv '{}' /some/dir/ \;
Also, if your mv supports the -t option (to give target dir first, multiple files after), you can use {} + placeholder in find for multiple files, reducing the total number of mv command invocations (thanks #CharlesDuffy):
find -name 'fsimage*' -mtime +7 -exec mv -t /some/dir/ '{}' +
the -exec as you wrote it is quite meaningless, moreover it seems you are mixing find syntax with shell oe (-exec as you wrote it should be passed to find)
there are probably more concise ways of doing, but this should do what you expect:
find -name 'fsimage*' -type f | xargs ls -ali | grep 'Oct 20' | awk '{ print $NF }' | while read file; do mv "$file" /hdd/fordelete/ ; done
nevertheless, you should take care of not just copy/paste things you do not really understand from the web, you may wreck you system...
I'm working on Linux and there is a folder, which contains lots of sub directories. I need to delete all of sub directories which have a same name. For example,
dir
|---subdir1
|---subdir2
| |-----subdir1
|---file
I want to delete all of subdir1. Here is my script:
find dir -type d -name "subdir1" | while read directory ; do
rm -rf $directory
done
However, I execute it but it seems that nothing happens.
I've tried also find dir -type d "subdir1" -delete, but still, nothing happens.
If find finds the correct directories at all, these should work:
find dir -type d -name "subdir1" -exec echo rm -rf {} \;
or
find dir -type d -name "subdir1" -exec echo rm -rf {} +
(the echo is there for verifying the command hits the files you wanted, remove it to actually run the rm and remove the directories.)
Both piping to xargs and to while read have the downside that unusual file names will cause issues. Also, find -delete will only try to remove the directories themselves, not their contents. It will fail on any non-empty directories (but you should at least get errors).
With xargs, spaces separate words by default, so even file names with spaces will not work. read can deal with spaces, but in your command it's the unquoted expansion of $tar that splits the variable on spaces.
If your filenames don't have newlines or trailing spaces, this should work, too:
find ... | while read -r x ; do rm -rf "$x" ; done
With the globstar option (enable with shopt -s globstar, requires Bash 4.0 or newer):
rm -rf **/subdir1/
The drawback of this solution as compared to using find -exec or find | xargs is that the argument list might become too long, but that would require quite a lot of directories named subdir1. On my system, ARG_MAX is 2097152.
Using xargs:
find dir -type d -name "subdir1" -print0 |xargs -0 rm -rf
Some information not directly related to the question/problem:
find|xargs or find -exec
https://www.everythingcli.org/find-exec-vs-find-xargs/
From the question, it seems you've tried to use while with find. The following substitution may help you:
while IFS= read -rd '' dir; do rm -rf "$dir"; done < <(find dir -type d -name "subdir" -print0)
I'm trying to create a job to delete files on a linux box older than X days. Pretty straightforward with:
find /path/to/files -mtime +X -exec rm {}\;
Problem is all my files have special characters b/c they are pictures from a webcam - most contain parenthesis so the above command fails with "no such file or directory".
Have you tried this:
find /path/to/files -mtime +X -exec rm '{}' \;
Or perhaps:
rm $(find /path/to/files -mtime +X);
Or even this method using xargs instead of -exec:
find /path/to/files -mtime +X | xargs rm -f;
Another twist on xargs is to use -print0 which will help the script differentiate between spaces in filenames & spaces between the returned list by using the ASCII null character as a file separator:
find /path/to/files -mtime +X -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f;
Or as man find explains under -print0:
This primary always evaluates to true. It prints the pathname of
the current file to standard output, followed by an ASCII NUL
character (character code 0).
I would also recommend adding the -maxdepth and -type flags to better control what the script does. So I would use this for a dry-run test:
find /path/to/files -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime +1 -exec echo '{}' \;
The -maxdepth flag controls how many directories down the find will execute and -type will limit the search to files (aka: f) so the script is focused on files only. This will simply echo the results. Then when you are comfortable with it, change the echo to rm.
Does
find /path/to/files -mtime +X -print | tr '()' '?' | xargs rm -f
work?
In a Linux terminal, how to delete all files from a folder except one or two?
For example.
I have 100 image files in a directory and one .txt file.
I want to delete all files except that .txt file.
From within the directory, list the files, filter out all not containing 'file-to-keep', and remove all files left on the list.
ls | grep -v 'file-to-keep' | xargs rm
To avoid issues with spaces in filenames (remember to never use spaces in filenames), use find and -0 option.
find 'path' -maxdepth 1 -not -name 'file-to-keep' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Or mixing both, use grep option -z to manage the -print0 names from find
In general, using an inverted pattern search with grep should do the job. As you didn't define any pattern, I'd just give you a general code example:
ls -1 | grep -v 'name_of_file_to_keep.txt' | xargs rm -f
The ls -1 lists one file per line, so that grep can search line by line. grep -v is the inverted flag. So any pattern matched will NOT be deleted.
For multiple files, you may use egrep:
ls -1 | grep -E -v 'not_file1.txt|not_file2.txt' | xargs rm -f
Update after question was updated:
I assume you are willing to delete all files except files in the current folder that do not end with .txt. So this should work too:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
find supports a -delete option so you do not need to -exec. You can also pass multiple sets of -not -name somefile -not -name otherfile
user#host$ ls
1.txt 2.txt 3.txt 4.txt 5.txt 6.txt 7.txt 8.txt josh.pdf keepme
user#host$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name keepme -not -name 8.txt -delete
user#host$ ls
8.txt keepme
Use the not modifier to remove file(s) or pattern(s) you don't want to delete, you can modify the 1 passed to -maxdepth to specify how many sub directories deep you want to delete files from
find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
You can also do:
find -maxdepth 1 \! -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
In bash, you can use:
$ shopt -s extglob # Enable extended pattern matching features
$ rm !(*.txt) # Delete all files except .txt files