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 '{}' \;
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
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'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 {}/*" \;
I need to delete unpacked directories from my /source tree keeping the others with .tar and .patch extensions,
how to do please?
This should work:
find . -not -name "*.tar" -not -name "*.patch" -type f -exec rm {} \;
This is using only one command not using pipes.
Note. This will proceed recursively into subdirectories. If this is unwanted, use the maxdepth switch:
find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name "*.tar" -not -name "*.patch" -type f -exec rm {} \;
BACKUP YOUR DIRECTORY FIRST, I HAVE NOT TESTED THIS, AND IT HAS A BUG AS NOTED IN THE COMMENTS.
WHILE IN THE ACTUAL /source DIRECTORY:
ls|fgrep -v -e .tar -e .patch|xargs rm -rf
You probably want to use the "put echo after xargs" trick to see what this would actually do, before running it:
ls|fgrep -v -e .tar -e .patch|xargs echo rm -rf
In Linux, how do I remove folders with a certain name which are nested deep in a folder hierarchy?
The following paths are under a folder and I would like to remove all folders named a.
1/2/3/a
1/2/3/b
10/20/30/a
10/20/30/b
100/200/300/a
100/200/300/b
What Linux command should I use from the parent folder?
If the target directory is empty, use find, filter with only directories, filter by name, execute rmdir:
find . -type d -name a -exec rmdir {} \;
If you want to recursively delete its contents, replace -exec rmdir {} \; with -delete or -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;. Other answers include details about these versions, credit them too.
Use find for name "a" and execute rm to remove those named according to your wishes, as follows:
find . -name a -exec rm -rf {} \;
Test it first using ls to list:
find . -name a -exec ls {} \;
To ensure this only removes directories and not plain files, use the "-type d" arg (as suggested in the comments):
find . -name a -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;
The "{}" is a substitution for each file "a" found - the exec command is executed against each by substitution.
This also works - it will remove all the folders called "a" and their contents:
rm -rf `find . -type d -name a`
I ended up here looking to delete my node_modules folders before doing a backup of my work in progress using rsync. A key requirements is that the node_modules folder can be nested, so you need the -prune option.
First I ran this to visually verify the folders to be deleted:
find . -type d -name node_modules -prune
Then I ran this to delete them all:
find . -type d -name node_modules -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;
Thanks to pistache
To delete all directories with the name foo, run:
find -type d -name foo -a -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;
The other answers are missing an important thing: the -prune option. Without -prune, GNU find will delete the directory with the matching name and then try to recurse into it to find more directories that match. The -prune option tells it to not recurse into a directory that matched the conditions.
This command works for me. It does its work recursively
find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +
. - current folder
"node_modules" - folder name
find ./ -name "FOLDERNAME" | xargs rm -Rf
Should do the trick. WARNING, if you accidentally pump a . or / into xargs rm -Rf your entire computer will be deleted without an option to get it back, requiring an OS reinstall.
Combining multiple answers, here's a command that works on both Linux and MacOS
rm -rf $(find . -type d -name __pycache__)
I had more than 100 files like
log-12
log-123
log-34
....
above answers did not work for me
but the following command helped me.
find . -name "log-*" -exec rm -rf {} \;
i gave -type as . so it deletes both files and folders which starts with log-
and rm -rf deletes folders recursively even it has files.
if you want folders alone
find -type d -name "log-*" -exec rm -rf {} \;
files alone
find -type f -name "log-*" -exec rm -rf {} \;
Another one:
"-exec rm -rf {} \;" can be replaced by "-delete"
find -type d -name __pycache__ -delete # GNU find
find . -type d -name __pycache__ -delete # POSIX find (e.g. Mac OS X)
Earlier comments didn't work for me since I was looking for an expression within the folder name in some folder within the structure
The following works for a folder in a structure like:
b/d/ab/cd/file or c/d/e/f/a/f/file
To check before using rm-rf
find . -name *a* -type d -exec realpath {} \;
Removing folders including content recursively
find . -name *a* -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;
find path/to/the/folders -maxdepth 1 -name "my_*" -type d -delete