Example of command as used in bash script:
find '/Files' -type d -name temp* -depth -delete -print
This command should delete all folders, whose names start with "temp" in '/Files' folder and its subfolders ("temp0", "temp1", "temp2" etc.).
Script is working as expected, folders are found and properly deleted.
But sometimes, for some users, on some computers etc. script is not working as expected, despite the fact that folders & files are exactly the same.
Find command fails like this:
find /Files -type d -name tempta temptal -depth -delete -print
find: temptal: unknown primary or operator
I can't find out where "tempta" and "temptal" are coming - i don't have files with that names anywhere in the folder. Temp* folders are present, but not deleted because of this error.
The only thing which might be connected, are two files named "AbcInstall.sh" and "AbcInstall.log" in "AbcTemp" subfolder. So we have "ta" and "tal" plus "Temp". These are elements which reminds on "tempta" and "temptal", but they make no real sense - it could be a coincidence.
How can "find" result resolve into something like this !?!
Sorry for the lack of better explanation - this problem is really weird. The problem is that i can't replicate this issue on my computer so all i can do is experimenting (so far without success).
Any hints or ideas are greatly appreciated.
Thx!
Related
I have a certain github repo that I used to test out netlify and vuepress. I somewhat lost track of where it is on the file system, so I was planning to use mdfind (I am on mac) or find to locate all the .git/config files and then grep for my github url.
But it seems surprisingly hard to convince find to look for config under the hidden .git directories.
I did find How do I search all hidden files that are in hidden folders using Terminal? and looking at it, it looks like the following would work:
find . -name '.*' \( -type d -exec find {} \; -prune -o -print \) | egrep '/.git/config'
but given that config is a highly specific file for git, I was hoping that there is a better suited find command that will do the trick. I have already given up on mdfind as it the linked question's accepted answer is skeptical about getting it to reliably find hidden files.
Note: not looking for answers based on the locate utility, or some GUI tool, this is strictly about getting find to do the work.
Use -path.
find . -path '*/.git/config'
Yesterday I made a question here: How can I run a bash in every subfolder of a base folder and my main problem was solved but I have another one: I don't know why but the rename command does NOTHING if I try to use it recursively. I've tried all different options they told me and other I found and if I run the rename on a single directory it works fine (so the line its ok) but can't make it work recursively.
The question of optimizing images doen't matter now cause I changed the script to do it first. Now I have all the images like this way: image.png (which is the oriniginal) and image-nq8.png which is the optimized one)
What I want now is to have the optimized one with the name of the original, and the original deleted. But as any of my attempts on it, they all fail and I don't know why.
I made an script: scriptloop
for i in $(find /path/to/start/ -name "*.png");do
rename -nq8.png .png *-nq8*
done
and call it this way: ./scriptloop
and tried too using: find . -name '*-nq8.png' -print0 | xargs -0 -P6 -n1 scriptOneLine
with this inside scriptOneLine: rename -nq8.png .png *-nq8*
Note: as I said if I run rename -nq8.png .png *-nq8* on a directory it works but I can't make it work recursive. Any idea of why or what am I doing wrong? (I'm on fedora)
Thank you so much
I thought this would be more of a one liner to be honest.
Pretty simple in notion:
using find on Mac OS X, locate files that meet a criteria, in my case:
all file and directories in a directory:
find ~/Downloads +time1000s
That finds what I need, then I run a conditional, if a dir exists, delete it, if not, create it:
mkdir -p ~/.Trash/safe-to-delte-these-old-files
This means I need to add print0 to my find as files will have spaces, and I want to move, not copy but either way, there is a source, and a destination, and I am getting stuck:
https://gist.github.com/5c0tt/5a2c1fd39ae99d6fca05
Line 27 and 26 seem to cause me issues, I am stuck.
Suggestions on everyone from line 1 to the end. I am trying to hard to do this with POSIX in mind, but i can't even get variables to work then.
It seems BSD does not work the exact same way as other shells and what arguments they accept, which is why I am trying to be more POSIX, as I was told it should run anywhere then.
Thank you.
Took a glance at your git link, a couple of remarks if I may (still a noob tbh so may be irrelevant) :
dir_to_clean="/Users/my_username/Downloads" should probably be dir_to_clean="/Users/$current_user/Downloads" unless you actually have a literal /Users/my_username/Downloads folder.
Instead of cd'ing into your users directory and since you have hardcoded the path to that directory, you could use pushd & popd instead in order to build a stack of directories.
To answer your question, to capture files with spaces in the name for removal you could use something like :
find $dir_to_clean -not -name . +time1000s -exec mv -- {} ~/.Trash/
Could be something like this :
# Initialise variables, user, source to clean, destination
user=$(whoami);
src="/Users/$user/Downloads";
dest="~/.Trash/safe_to_delete";
# Move to directory to clean, not necessary, but if you really want to
pushd $src;
# Check if the destination exists, if not, create it
if [ ! -d $dest ]; then
mkdir -p $dest;
else
echo "destination already exists";
fi
# Find all the file to move then move them
find . -not -name . +time1000s -exec mv -- {} "$dest/" \;
# Return to previous working directory
popd;
pushd the $src directory onto the stack. find all the files in the now current directory ., -not -name . in order to avoid trying to trash the . & .. folders, -- tells find to stop parsing command line options (in cas your file/folder is named i.e. -myfile.txt), exec mv all of the arguments to $dest. popd the still current directory off of the stack. man find (/exec) for more details.
Note : It is also interesting to know that the difference of execution time between the -exec option versus results being piped into xargs can and will often be quite dramatic. Also, if your are actually sure that those files are safe_to_delete, then delete them instead of moving them (-exec rm -- {} $dest/). With all that said, you were correct, one liner.
Further reading :
http://www.softpanorama.org/Tools/Find/using_exec_option_and_xargs_in_find.shtml
I need a script that will find and get me all files in all subdirectories (and leave them in the folder structure as they are now). I know how to find and print that files:
find . -name "something.extension"
The point is, in those directories are lots files that was used before, but I don't want to get those, so the script should only find me files that matches some kind of path pattern which is:
xxx/trunk/xxx/src/main/resources
xxx is different everytime, and after resources there are still some folders that directories are different based on xxx.
Every top xxx folder contains folder named 'tags' (the same level as trunk) that stores previous releases of module (and every release has files that name I am looking for, but I don't want outdated files).
So I want to find all that files in subdirectories of that path pattern that I specified and copy to new location but leave folder structure as it is right now.
I am using Windows and cygwin.
Update
I combined answer commands that 'that other guy' posted below, and it works. Just to be clear I have something like this:
find */trunk/*/src/main/resources -name "something.extension" -exec mkdir -p /absolute/target/path/{} \; -exec cp {} /absolute/target/path/{} \;
Thanks.
Instead of searching under the entire current directory (.), just search under the directories you care about:
find */trunk/*/src/main/resources -name "something.extension"
I'm currently writing a bash script wherein a portion of it needs to be able to look at a bunch of directory hierarchies and spit out two text files each containing a list of the directories and all the files, respectively, in the given directory.
As I understand the following should do the trick:
find $directory -type d >> alldirs.txt
where directory is assigned different directory path names since I'm supposed to check a number of them.
I have a for loop the iterates through my list of directories and uses the above function to complete my task. The above command gets to a certain point and then it gets stuck. When I investigated the issue it seemed like it would get to a directory that's empty and then it get stuck. And or it would actually start looking for directories that don't exist in the first place then it would get stuck. Any ideas?
Is there something I'm missing? Or did I understand how that works incorrectly? Is there a better alternative?
You haven't said $directory is a name. Without it, bash will complain that "find: $directory: No such file or directory"
For example:
find . -iname $directory -type d >> alldirs.txt
Note: The above will start searching in the current directory, specified by the "."
Change it to whatever directory you wish e.g. /home/mys.celeste
I had similar issue: find / -name blahblah stuck somewhere
When debugging I tried to search in all root directories like/tmp, /var, /sbin, /user and so on. And found that it is stuck on /media.
In /media I had RHEL repo mounted. So afterunmount - find continue to work normally.