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.
Related
I need to delete all files with a pattern name: 2020*.js
Inside a specific directory: server/db/migrations/
And then show what it have been deleted: `| xargs``
I'm trying this:
find . -name 'server/db/migrations/2020*.js' #-delete | xargs
But nothing is deleted, and shows nothing.
What I'm doing wrong?
The immediate problem is that -name only looks at the last component of the file name (so 2020xxx.js) and cannot match anything with a slash in it. You can use the -path predicate but the correct solution is to simply delete these files directly:
rm -v server/db/migrations/2020*.js
The find command is useful when you need to traverse subdirectories.
Also, piping the output from find to xargs does not do anything useful; if find prints the names by itself, xargs does not add any value, and if it doesn't, well, xargs can't do anything with an empty input.
If indeed you want to traverse subdirectories, try
find server/db/migrations/ -type f -name '2020*.js' -print -delete
If your shell supports ** you could equally use
rm -v server/db/migrations/**/2020*.js
which however has a robustness problem if there can be very many matching files (you get "command line too long"). In that scenario, probably fall back to find after all.
You're looking for something like this:
find server/db/migrations -type f -name '2020*.js' -delete -print
You have try this:
find . -name 'server/db/migrations/2020*.js' | xargs rm
I need to delete everything in directory d1, except the file d1/d2/f1.txt. How can I do that in bash?
This works. It will delete everything, but the directories in path of f1.txt and of course the file itself.
find d1/ ! -iregex '\(d1/\|d1/d2\|d1/d2/f1.txt\)' -delete
However, I would strongly suggest against using -delete as it is permanent and mistyping a character could be disastorous...
You should try something like this instead, putting files and directories in trash folder first just in case you delete a file you don't want to delete you can recover it.
mkdir -p ~/.Trash
find d1/ ! -iregex '\(d1/\|d1/d2\|d1/d2/f1.txt\)' -exec mv {} ~/.Trash \;
Find the contents to delete except for (!) specific file:
find d1/ -type f ! -name 'd1/d2/f1.txt' -delete
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.
I have a directory which contains a number of files (no subdirectories). I wish to find these files. The following gets me close:
$ find docs
docs
docs/bar.txt
docs/baz.txt
docs/foo.txt
I don't want the directory itself to be listed. I could do this instead:
$ find docs -type f
docs/bar.txt
docs/baz.txt
docs/foo.txt
Using a wildcard seems to do the trick as well:
$ find docs/*
docs/bar.txt
docs/baz.txt
docs/foo.txt
My understanding is that these work in different ways: with -type, we're providing a single path to find, whereas in the latter case we're using wildcard expansion to pass several paths to find. Is there a reason to favour one approach over the other?
You have a UNIX tag, and you example has a *. Some versions of find have a problem with that.
If the directory has no subdirectories.
FYI.
Generally the first parms to find has to be a directory or a list of directories
find /dir1 /dir2 -print
Find is recursive - so it will follow each directory down listing every thing, symlinks, directories, pipes, and regular files. This can be confusing. -type delimits your search
find /dir1 /dir2 -type f -print
You can also have find do extra output example: have it rm files older than 30 days for example:
find /dir1 /dir2 -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm {} \;
Or give complete infomation
find /dir1 /dir2 -type f -mtime +30 -exec ls -l {} \;
find /dir1 /dir2 -type f -mtime +30 -ls # works on some systems
To answer your question: because find can be dangerous ALWAYS fully specify each directory , file type ,etc., when you are using a nasty command like rm. You might have forgotten your favorite directory is also in there. Or the one used to generate your paycheck. Using a wildcard is ok for just looking around.
Using *
find /path/to/files -type f -name 'foo*'
-- tics or quotes around strings with a star in them in some UNIX systems.
find docs -type f
will get you a listing of every non-directory file of every subdirectory of docs
find docs/*
will get you a listing of every file AND every subdirectory of docs
This should be relatively trivial but I have been trying for some time without much luck.
I have a directory, with many sub-directories, each with their own structure and files.
I am looking to find all .java files within any directory under the working directory, and rename them to a particular name.
For example, I would like to name all of the java files test.java.
If the directory structure is a follows:
./files/abc/src/abc.java
./files/eee/src/foo.java
./files/roo/src/jam.java
I want to simply rename to:
./files/abc/src/test.java
./files/eee/src/test.java
./files/roo/src/test.java
Part of my problem is that the paths may have spaces in them.
I don't need to worry about renaming classes or anything inside the files, just the file names in place.
If there is more than one .java file in a directory, I don't mind if it is overwritten, or a prompt is given, to choose what to do (either is OK, it is unlikely that there are more than one in each directory.
What I have tried:
I have looked into mv and find; but, when I pipe them together, I seem to be doing it wrong. I want to make sure to keep the files in their current location and rename, and not move.
The GNU version of find has an -execdir action which changes directory to wherever the file is.
find . -name '*.java' -execdir mv {} test.java \;
If your version of find doesn't support -execdir then you can get the job done with:
find . -name '*.java' -exec bash -c 'mv "$1" "${1%/*}"/test.java' -- {} \;
If your find command (like mine) doesn't support -execdir, try the following:
find . -name "*.java" -exec bash -c 'mv "{}" "$(dirname "{}")"/test.java' \;