Recursively remove files - linux

Does anyone have a solution to remove those pesky ._ and .DS_Store files that one gets after moving files from a Mac to A Linux Server?
specify a start directory and let it go? like /var/www/html/ down...

change to the directory, and use:
find . -name ".DS_Store" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
find . -name "._*" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
Not tested, try them without the xargs first!
You could replace the period after find, with the directory, instead of changing to the directory first.
find /dir/here ...

find /var/www/html \( -name '.DS_Store' -or -name '._*' \) -delete

Newer findutils supports -delete, so:
find . -name ".DS_Store" -delete
Add -print to also get a list of deletions.
Command will work for you if you have an up-to-date POSIX system, I believe. At least it works for me on OS X 10.8 and works for others who've tested it on macOS 10.12 (Mojave).
Credit to #ephemient in a comment on #X-Istence's post (thought it was helpful enough to warrant its own answer).

Simple command:
rm `find ./ -name '.DS_Store'` -rf
rm `find ./ -name '._'` -rf
Good luck!

cd /var/www/html && find . -name '.DS_Store' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
cd /var/www/html && find . -name '._*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

You could switch to zsh instead of bash. This lets you use ** to match files anywhere in a directory tree:
$ rm /var/www/html/**/_* /var/www/html/**/.DS_Store
You can also combine them like this:
$ rm /var/www/html/**/(_*|.DS_Store)
Zsh has lots of other features that bash lacks, but that one alone is worth making the switch for. It is available in most (probably all) linux distros, as well as cygwin and OS X.
You can find more information on the zsh site.

find . -name "FILE-TO-FIND"-exec rm -rf {} \;

Example to delete "Thumbs.db" recursively;
find . -iname "Thumbs.db" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
Validate by:
find . -iname "Thumbs.db"
This should now, not display any of the entries with "Thumbs.db", inside the current path.

It is better to see what is removing by adding -print to this answer
find /var/www/html \( -name '.DS_Store' -or -name '._*' \) -delete -print

if you have Bash 4.0++
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
for file in /var/www/html/**/.DS_Store /var/www/html/**/._
do
echo rm "$file"
done

A few things to note:
'-delete' is not recursive. So if .TemporaryItems (folder) has files in it, the command fails.
There are a lot of these pesky files created by macs:
.DS_Store
._.DS_Store
.TemporaryItems
.apdisk
This one command addresses all of them. Saves from running find over and over again for multiple matches.
find /home/foo \( -name '.DS_Store' -or -name '._.DS_Store' -or -name '._*' -or -name '.TemporaryItems' -or -name '.apdisk' \) -exec rm -rf {} \;

This also works:
sudo rm -rf 2018-03-*
here your deleting files with names of the format 2018-03-(something else)
keep it simple

Related

How to "rm -rf" with excluding files and folders with the "find -o" command

I'm trying to use the find command, but still can't figure out how to pipe the find ... to rm -rf
Here is the directory tree for testing:
/path/to/directory
/path/to/directory/file1_or_dir1_to_exclude
/path/to/directory/file2_or_dir2_to_exclude
/path/to/directory/.hidden_file1_or_dir1_to_exclude
/path/to/directory/.hidden_file2_or_dir2_to_exclude
/path/to/directory/many_other_files
/path/to/directory/many_other_directories
Here is the command for removing the whole directory:
rm -rf /path/to/directory
But how to rm -rf while excluding files and folders?
Here is the man help for reference:
man find
-prune True; if the file is a directory, do not descend into it. If
-depth is given, then -prune has no effect. Because -delete im‐
plies -depth, you cannot usefully use -prune and -delete to‐
gether.
For example, to skip the directory `src/emacs' and all files
and directories under it, and print the names of the other files
found, do something like this:
find . -path ./src/emacs -prune -o -print
What's the -o in this find command? Does it mean "or"? I can't find the meaning of -o in the man page.
mkdir -p /path/to/directory
mkdir -p /path/to/directory/file1_or_dir1_to_exclude
mkdir -p /path/to/directory/file2_or_dir2_to_exclude
mkdir -p /path/to/directory/.hidden_file1_or_dir1_to_exclude
mkdir -p /path/to/directory/.hidden_file2_or_dir2_to_exclude
mkdir -p /path/to/directory/many_other_files
mkdir -p /path/to/directory/many_other_directories
I have tried to use this find command to exclude the .hidden_file1_or_dir1_to_exclude and then pipe it to rm, but this command does not work as expected.
cd /path/to/directory
find . -path ./.hidden_file1_or_dir1_to_exclude -prune -o -print | xargs -0 -I {} rm -rf {}
The meaning of rm -rf is to recursively remove everything in a directory tree.
The way to avoid recursively removing everything inside a directory is to get find to enumerate exactly the files you want to remove, and nothing else (and then of course you don't need rm at all; find knows how to remove files, too).
find . -depth -path './.hidden_file1_or_dir1_to_exclude/*' -o -delete
Using -delete turns on the -depth option, which disables the availability of -prune; but just say "delete if not in this tree" instead. And indeed, as you seem to have discovered already, -o stands for "or".
The reason -delete enables -depth should be obvious; you can't traverse the files inside a directory after you have deleted it.
As an aside, you need to use -print0 if you use xargs -0. (This facility is a GNU extension, and generally not available on POSIX.)
You need to separate files from directories to exclude:
find . -mindepth 1\
\( -path ./dir_to_exclude -o\
-path ./.hidden_dir_to_exclude \) -type d -prune\
-o\
! \( -path ./file_to_exclude -o\
-path ./.hidden_file_to_exclude \)\
-exec echo rm -rf {} \;
You can remove the echo once tested.

remove files that are in find result

I want to remove all files that have ".json" extension. so I run
find . -name "*.json"
this will result in some files
x.json
y.json
z.json
then I do rm for each file, but this is a very tedious task when you have many files.
is there any way to mix rm with find result
If using GNU find, it's dead simple:
find directory/ -name "*.json" -delete
You can use -exec option with find.
find . -name '*.json' -exec rm -f {} \;
You can use xargs which will give found files to another command.
The advantage on -exec is that does not create one new process per file:
find . -name "*.json" | xargs rm

How to write a unix command or script to remove files of the same type in all sub-folders under current directory?

Is there a way to remove all temp files and executables under one folder AND its sub-folders?
All that I can think of is:
$rm -rf *.~
but this removes only temp files under current directory, it DOES NOT remove any other temp files under SUB-folders at all, also, it doesn't remove any executables.
I know there are similar questions which get very well answered, like this one:
find specific file type from folder and its sub folder
but that is a java code, I only need a unix command or a short script to do this.
Any help please?
Thanks a lot!
Perl from command line; should delete if file ends with ~ or it is executable,
perl -MFile::Find -e 'find(sub{ unlink if -f and (/~\z/ or (stat)[2] & 0111) }, ".")'
You can achieve the result with find:
find /path/to/directory \( -name '*.~' -o \( -perm /111 -a -type f \) \) -exec rm -f {} +
This will execute rm -f <path> for any <path> under (and including) /path/to/base/directory which:
matches the glob expression *.~
or which has an executable bit set (be it owner, group or world)
The above applies to the GNU version of find.
A more portable version is:
find /path/to/directory \( -name '*.~' -o \( \( -perm -01 -o -perm -010 -o -perm -0100 \) \
-a -type f \) \) -exec rm -f {} +
find . -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;
or whatever pattern is needed to match the tmp files.
If you want to use Perl to do it, use a specific module like File::Remove
This should do the job
find -type f -name "*~" -print0 | xargs -r -0 rm

find command in bash script resulting in "No such file or directory" error only for directories?

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.

How to find in linux and delete directories that not match a name? !#Bash

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

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