How to recursively delete files using regular expressions on OSx - terminal

I want to delete all the temp files under a specific directory and all its subdirectories. I can search for the files using the command find ./* -iname "._*" but how do I delete all these files? I know -iname is not working with rm and rm */._* didn't really work as I was expecting

Your specific find
find ./* -iname '._*' -delete
a more general example (delete all .orig files after a git merge);
find . -name '*.orig' -type f -delete

Related

Mac terminal how can i search in all folders and subfolders for image

How can i search for example all .png files on an external disk and copy them to another directory?
Have tried to use the cp command. Have try it but don't work for me
?
Monterey 2.2.1
cp /Volumes/Data *.png /Volumes/Data/pictures_png
cp command won't work if you need to recursively copy from the sub directories. You need to use find.
Syntax:
find $SOURCE -type f -name '*.type' -exec cp '{}' $DESTINATION ';'
In your case,
find /Volumes/Data -type f -name '*.png' -exec cp '{}' /Volumes/Data/pictures_png ';'
Here is how it works:
-type f means copy only files not directories.
-name is to provide the filename to find. Here *.png for pattern matching
-exec executes the following line for each result the above find returns.
{} will be replaced with the results from find
; terminates -exec command

How to delete a specific folder in specific folders

Using
find . -name "*_develop-*"
I am able to find all folders in the current directory that contain _develop- in the folder name, e.g.
myfolder_develop-abcd
myfolder_develop-efgh
Now inside these found folders I'd like to delete the folder "temp".
How do I pipe the required command to look into the resulting folders, find the required folder and then delete it?
You can use -exec option to make a rm -rf command on match folder.
Command should be like that :
find . -name "*_develop-" -exec rm -rf {}/tmp/ \;
{} represent a match folder, so {}/tmp/ represent tmp folder inside a match folder
You could use -regex flag
find . -regex '.*_develop-.*/temp' -type d -delete
or if it is the folder directly below
find . -regex '.*_develop-[^/]*/temp' -type d -delete
Use find with xargs
find . -wholename "*_develop-*/temp" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
Using print0 and xargs -0 replace spaces by a NULL character. It is useful if there is spaces in some directory names, so xargs would fail without it.
You could use find . -wholename "*_develop-*/temp" -delete but that will fail if temp directory is not empty.

Bash script for removing specific file from certain subdirectories

On a unix server, I'm trying to figure out how to remove a file, say "example.xls", from any subdirectories that start with v0 ("v0*").
I have tried something like:
find . -name "v0*" -type d -exec find . -name "example.xls" -type f
-exec rm {} \;
But i get errors. I have a solution but it works too well, i.e. it will delete the file in any subdirectory, regardless of it's name:
find . -type f -name "example.xls" -exec rm -f {} \;
Any ideas?
You will probably have to do it in two steps -- i.e. first find the directories, and then the files -- you can use xargs to make it in a single line, like
find . -name "v0*" -type d | \
xargs -l -I[] \
find [] -name "example.xls" -type f -exec rm {} \;
what it does, is first generating a list of viable directory name, and let xargs call the second find with the names locating the file name within that directory
Try:
find -path '*/v0*/example.xls' -delete
This matches only files named example.xls which, somewhere in its path, has a parent directory name that starts with v0.
Note that since find offers -delete as an action, it is not necessary to invoke the external executable rm.
Example
Consider this directory structure:
$ find .
.
./a
./a/example.xls
./a/v0
./a/v0/b
./a/v0/b/example.xls
./a/v0/example.xls
We can identify files example.xls who have one of their parent directories named v0*:
$ find -path '*/v0*/example.xls'
./a/v0/b/example.xls
./a/v0/example.xls
To delete those files:
find -path '*/v0*/example.xls' -delete
Alternative: find only those files directly under directory v0*
find -regex '.*/v0[^/]*/example.xls'
Using the above directory structure, this approach returns one file:
$ find -regex '.*/v0[^/]*/example.xls'
./a/v0/example.xls
To delete such files:
find -regex '.*/v0[^/]*/example.xls' -delete
Compatibility
Although my tests were performed with GNU find, both -regex and -path are required by POSIX and also supported by OSX.

Deleting files older than 10 days in wildcard directory loop

I would like to delete old files from multiple directories but there is a wild card for one of the path attributes. So I'm trying to loop through each of those directories without specifying each one. I think I'm almost there but I'm not sure how to cd into the specific directory to delete the relevant files.
#! /bin/bash
DELETE_SEARCH_DIR=/apps/super/userprojects/elasticsearch/v131/node*/elasticsearch-1.3.1/logs/
for entry in `ls $DELETE_SEARCH_DIR`; do
find $path -name "*super*" -type f -mtime +10 -print -delete
#find . -type f -name $entry -exec rm -f {} \;
done
Any ideas on how to get into the specific directory and apply the delete?
find can search in multiple directories. You can do it like this:
DELETE_SEARCH_DIR=/apps/super/userprojects/elasticsearch/v131/node*/elasticsearch-1.3.1/logs
find $DELETE_SEARCH_DIR -type f -name '*super*' -mtime +10 -print -delete

Quick way to remove all folders titled CVS in a directory and it's subdirectories?

I have been using CVS and am having trouble when moving files from other projects. Is there a easy way to remove all folders [and subfolders] with the name 'CVS' so that i can add them correctly to my new cvs repo?
First try to find them find . -name CVS, then remove them find . -name CVS -delete. If you'd like to ensure that only folders are removed, just add the -type d option to the find commands.
Another possible solution with more information during the search and deletion: find . -type d -name CVS -exec rm -rv {} \;
Use find:
find . -iname "*cvs*" -delete

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