This is my directory structure
find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -t
./lisst.txt ./SAMN03272855/SRR1734376/SRR1734376_1.fastq.gz
./SAMN03272854/SRR1734375/SRR1734375_2.fastq.gz ./SAMN07605670/SRR6006890/SRR6006890_2.fastq.gz
./SAMN03272854/SRR1734375/SRR1734375_1.fastq.gz ./SAMN07605670/SRR6006890/SRR6006890_1.fastq.gz
./SAMN03272855/SRR1734376/SRR1734376_2.fastq.gz
So this is a small subset of my folder/files where i have around 70.
I have a made a list of files which i want to keep and other i would like to delete.
My list.txt contains SAMN03272854,SAMN03272855 but I want to remove SAMN07605670.
I ran this
find . ! -name 'lisst.txt' -type d -exec rm -vrf {} +
It removed everything
QUESTION UPDATE
In my list it contains the folder i want to keep and the one which are not there are to be removed.
The folders which are to be removed also contains subdirectories and files. I want to remove everything
Your command selects each directory in the tree, except a directories of the funny name lisst.txt. Once it finds a directory, you do a recursive remove of this directory. No surprise that your files are gone.
You can't use rm -r when you want to spare certain files from deletion. This means that you also can't remove a directory, which somewhere below in its subtree has a file you want to keep.
I would run two find commands: The first removes all the files, ignoring directories, and second one removes all directories, which are empty (bottom-up). Assuming that SAMN03272854 is indeed a file (as you told us in your question), this would be:
find . -type f \( ! \( -name SAMN03272854 -o -name SAMN03272855 \) \) -exec rm {}
find . -depth -type d -exec rmdir {} 2>/dev/null
The error redirection in the latter command suppresses messages from rmdir for directories which still contain files you want to keep. Of course other messages are also suppressed. I would during debugging run the command without error redirection, to see whether it is basically correct.
Things would get more complicated, if you have files and directories to keep, because to keep a directory likely implies to keep all the files below it. In this case, you can use the -prune option of find, which excludes directories including their subdirectories from being processed. See the find man page, which gives examples for this.
Related
Is there a command to execute in Bash that deletes all empty folders recursively until there is no empty folder in the tree? I could execute this:
find . -type d -empty | xargs -I '{}' rmdir {}
repeatedly until there is no more empty folders, but I am looking for something a bit more efficient. Especially since that to know whether there are empty folders left, I would have to execute the same command, i.e. two calls to find . -type d -empty in each iteration.
This is simple, given the GNU find utility:
find . -type d -empty -delete
This will delete empty directories; since the -delete option implies the -depth option, it will delete directories that only had empty directories underneath them, so there's no need to run it multiple times.
I'm a beginner with this stuff and seem to be running into an issue.
Basically, I have many files with names containing a keyword (let's call it "Category1") within a directory. For example:
ABC-Category1-XYZ.txt
I'm trying to move them from a directory into another directory with the same name as the keyword.
I started with this:
find /path_A -name "*Category1*" -exec mv {} /path_A/Category1 \;
It spit out something like this:
mv: rename /path_A/Category1 to /path_A/Category1/Category1: Invalid
Argument
So I did some fiddling and hypothesized that the problem was caused by the command trying to move the directory Category1 into itself(maybe). I decided to exclude directories from the search so it would only attempt to move files. I came up with this:
find /path_A -name "*Category1*" \(! -type d \) -exec mv {} /path_A/Category1 \;
This did move the files from their original location to where I wanted them, but it still gave me something like:
mv: /path_A/Category1/ABC-Category1-XYZ.txt and
/path_A/Category1/ABC-Category1-XYZ.txt are identical
I'm no expert, so I could be wrong... but I believe the command is trying to find and move the files from their original directory, then find them again. The directory Category1 is a subdirectory of the starting point, /path_A, So i believe it is finding the files it just moved in the directory Category1 and attempting to move them again.
Can anyone help me fix this issue?
You are creating new files that find tries to process. Safest approach is to move them somewhere else not in the path_A you are searching with find.
Or you can use prune to ignore that directory if you don't have any other directory matching:
find /path_A -name '*Category1*' -prune -type f -exec mv {} /path_A/Category1/ \;
Although another post has been accepted, let me post a proper answer.
Would you please try:
find /path_A -name 'Category1' -prune -o -type f -name '*Category1*' -exec mv -- {} /path_A/Category1/ \;
The option -prune is rather a command than a condition. It tells find to
ignore the directory tree specified by the conditions before -prune.
In this case it excludes the directory Category1 from the search.
The following -o is logical OR and may be interpreted something like instead or else. The order of the options makes difference.
Please be noticed the 1st category1 is the directory name to exclude and the 2nd *Category1* is the filenames to find.
If you are not sure which files are the result of find, try to execute:
find /path_A -name 'Category1' -prune -o -type f -name '*Category1*' -print
then tweak the options to see the change of output.
I want to delete a file from a directory which contains many subdirectories but the deletion should not happen in one subdiretory(searc) whose name is already predefined but path varies as shown below.So now how to delete a file i am using the below command
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
this command deletes all the files in the directory.So How can we delete the file without serching that subdirectory.
The subdirectory file name will be same but the path will different
for eg
Main
|
a--> searc
|
b-->x--->searc
|
c-->y-->x-->searc
now the
the subdirectory not to be searched can be present any where as shown above
I think you want the -prune option. In combination with a successful name match, this prevents descent into the named directories. Example:
% mkdir -p test/{a,b,c}
% touch test/{a,b,c}/foo.txt
% find test -name b -prune -o -name '*.txt' -print
test/a/foo.txt
test/c/foo.txt
I am not completely sure what you're asking, so I can give only somewhat generic advice.
You already know the -name option. This refers to the filename only. You can, however, also use -wholename (a.k.a. -path), which refers to the full path (beginning with the one given as first option to find).
So if you want to delete all *.txt files except in the foo/bar subdirectory, you can do this:
find . -type f -name "*.txt" ! -wholename "./foo/bar/*" -delete
Note the -delete option; it doesn't require a subshell, and is easier to type.
If you would like to exclude a certain directory name regardless of where in the tree it might be, just don't "root" it. In the above example, foo/bar was "rooted" to ./, so only a top-level foo/bar would match. If you write ! -wholename "*/foo/bar/*" instead (allowing anything before or after via the *), you would exclude any files below any directory foo/bar from the operation.
You can use xargs instead of the exec
find .... <without the --exec stuff> | grep -v 'your search' | xargs echo rm -f
Try this first. If it is satisfactory, you can remove the echo.
I was searching unsuccessfully for a solution to delete all the files inside a working directory except for the subdirectories inside.
I found a way to delete all the files inside all the directories, but I'm looking for a way to delete only the files on the same "level" I'm on.
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
The find command recursively searches a directory for files and folders that match the specified expressions.
-maxdepth 1 will only search the current level (when used with . or the top level when a directory is used instead), effectively turning of the recursive search feature
-type f specifies only files, and all files
#chepner recommended an improvement on the above to simply use
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete
Not sure why I didn't think of it in the first place but anyway.
I think it is as easy as this:
$ rm *
when inside the working directory.
I've tested it and it worked - it deleted all files in the working directory and didn't affected any files inside any subdirectory.
Keep in mind, that it if you want to remove hidden files as well, then you need:
$ rm * .*
How do I remove all files in a folder that start with the same prefix? For example:
I have files:
SVM1.txt
SVM2.csv
SVM3.mat
helloworld.txt
README.txt
I want to delete all the files that start with 'SVM'. Note that they start with the same prefix, but are of different filetype!
With wildcards, of course.
rm SVM*
In addition to the straightforward
rm SVM*
which might fail (command line too long) if there are many, many matching files, you can use
find . -prune -name 'SVM*' -exec rm {} +
which will repeatedly run rm on as many files at a time as possible until all matching files are deleted. -prune keeps find from descending into any subdirectories to find matching files.
In the directory where the files are,
ls | grep '^SVM.*' | xargs rm
Stop at grep ^SVM.* to double check that you have the right files to delete, then add the xargs rm.