I'm trying to get rid off all my Dropbox files including "File foo in conflict with copy from ..." I tried several lines of code but non of them worked so far :(
find | grep conflict | xargs -0 rm ""
Error: filename too long for rm because there is no file/line separator
When i use the following:
find | grep conflict | head -1 | xargs rm ""
I get errors because the filename contains spaces. What line of code should I choose to get rid of this problem?
You don't need xargs, you can do it directly with find:
find . -name '*conflict*' -delete
Alternatively, you could execute rm:
find . -name '*conflict*' -exec rm -- {} \+
-- prevents problems with file names that start with a dash. (Hat tip: mklement0)
find . -name '*conflict*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Related
I would like to rename several files picked by find in some directory, then use xargs and mv to rename the files, with parameter expansion. However, it did not work...
example:
mkdir test
touch abc.txt
touch def.txt
find . -type f -print0 | \
xargs -I {} -n 1 -0 mv {} "${{}/.txt/.tx}"
Result:
bad substitution
[1] 134 broken pipe find . -type f -print0
Working Solution:
for i in ./*.txt ; do mv "$i" "${i/.txt/.tx}" ; done
Although I finally got a way to fix the problem, I still want to know why the first find + xargs way doesn't work, since I don't think the second way is very general for similar tasks.
Thanks!
Remember that shell variable substitution happens before your command runs. So when you run:
find . -type f -print0 | \
xargs -I {} -n 1 -0 mv {} "${{}/.txt/.tx}"
The shell tries to expan that ${...} construct before xargs even
runs...and since that contents of that expression aren't a valid shell variable reference, you get an error. A better solution would be to use the rename command:
find . -type f -print0 | \
xargs -I {} -0 rename .txt .tx {}
And since rename can operate on multiple files, you can simplify
that to:
find . -type f -print0 | \
xargs -0 rename .txt .tx
I am currently in data folder which has following files and folders
Folders:
ISOLATE
JUKEBOX
Files:
XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
...
I want to put the files with .ISOLATE in Folder ISOLATE and .JUKEBOX ones in the JUKEBOX folder. How could I perform this task using terminal?
There are more than 12000 files, so I cannot really change the naming scheme.
Thanks in advance
Try to use wildcards:
mv *.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt ISOLATE/
mv *.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt JUKEBOX/
If the number of files is too high, you might need to move them in smaller loads.
find -name '*.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt' -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} ISOLATE/ +
-exec with + should accumulate the command line arguments the same way as xargs, so you shouldn't overflow the maximal number of arguments.
Since you're dealing with huge # of files, you can use this mv with xargs:
printf '%s\0' *.ISOLATE.* | xargs -0 mv -t ISOLATE/
printf '%s\0' *.JUKEBOX.* | xargs -0 mv -t JUKEBOX/
In addition to trying wildcards (bash pattern match or globs), which at some point will hit an upper limit based on the number of files, you can also use find and xargs:
find . -name '*.ISOLATE.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./ISOLATE
find . -name '*.JUKEBOX.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./JUKEBOX
Doing this won't be subject to the maximum number of command line arguments that the glob solution may hit.
They key things in the commands above are:
-maxdepth 1 ensures that find won't keep looking into the ./ISOLOATE or ./JUKEBOX subdirectories
-print0 causes find to delimit the file names with a null byte rather than whitespace. This protects you against files that have spaces or other special characters in their names.
-0 causes xargs to use the null byte delimiter rather than whitespace for the same reason
-IFILE tells xargs to use the string FILE for each of the arguments. Typically xargs puts the filenames on the right, which wouldn't work with the mv command.
I tested the approach with a small shell script:
touch XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
touch XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
touch XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
touch XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
mkdir ISOLATE
mkdir JUKEBOX
find . -name '*.ISOLATE.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./ISOLATE
find . -name '*.JUKEBOX.*.txt' -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -IFILE mv FILE ./JUKEBOX
find .
Which outputs:
$ bash example.sh
.
./example.sh
./ISOLATE
./ISOLATE/XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
./ISOLATE/XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.ISOLATE.quantifier.txt
./JUKEBOX
./JUKEBOX/XXX-12-2345-67A-89T-1011-12.ab20.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
./JUKEBOX/XXX-24-2345-67A-89T-2022-24.ab10.RenderBase20.JUKEBOX.quantifier.txt
I am trying to remove files within a directory. Some of the files have double-quotes around their name while others do not. An example of these files would be:
"DDD344".csv
D2DW.csv
Both these files are located in sub-directories within the directory YM.
To find such files and remove them, I invoke find like so:
find YM -name "*.csv" -print | xargs rm
The above command results in a lot of No such file or directory errors.
I tried using sed in the following way:
find yum/yum_hyd -name "\"*\".csv" | sed 's/"/\"/g' | xargs rm
but to no avail. How do I remove the files?
The problem is that you're using xargs. xargs is a horribly broken program that should never be used for anything except in conjunction with the nonstandard -0 option. Even so, I can't think of any advantages to doing that in this case. You should just execute rm directly from find.
find . -type f -name '"*".csv' -exec rm -f -- {} +
Will work. If you have GNU find, you may also use -delete.
try this:
find yum/yum_hyd -name "\"*\".csv" |sed 's/"/\\"/g'|xargs rm
explanation:
you want to replace " with \". but if you write \" directly, sed considers it as plain ", you have to escape the backslash. so \\" works.
I wasn't aware of this option until recently but you can list the inode of the file in the following way:
$ ls –il
In the output you will see that the first column contains the inode value. You can then use that value to find -inum the offending files and remove them.
Output
2616366 -rw-r--r-- 1 etc etc
$ find . -inum 2616366 -exec rm -f {} \;
This will remove the file with that specific inum.
As a test you can run the following to locate your files.
ls -il \"* | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n1 -I {} find -inum {}
Replace the final portion of this command (the "find -inum {}") with the "rm" command once you are satisfied.
This is also similar to the question on SuperUser
I'm getting results using find with filenames that have '~' and .swp, etc. So I did the following, but is there a better way to do this? The '.*.js' -iname '*.js' part feels "redundant".
$ find ./ '.*.js' -iname '*.js' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -n ".*loginError.*"
find: `.*.js': No such file or directory
./js/signin.js:252: foo.loginError();
./js/signin.js:339:foo.loginError = function() {
./js/signin.js:340: foo.log("ui.loginError");
Try using
find . -name \*.js -print0 | xargs -0 grep -n ".*loginError.*"
That will find only files with 'js' extension and not ending in ~ or .swp
EDIT: Added '0' -print0 (edit requires 6 characters so I'm adding this; ergh!)
To do it all in one command without the xargs you could do it like this
find . -name "*.js" -exec grep -n ".*loginError.*" /dev/null {} \;
the /dev/null piece is to make grep think it's searching multiple files and then it'll output the filename correctly, otherwise it'd just print out the line number without telling you which file it's in
I'm trying to write a bash command that will delete all files matching a specific pattern - in this case, it's all of the old vmware log files that have built up.
I've tried this command:
find . -name vmware-*.log | xargs rm
However, when I run the command, it chokes up on all of the folders that have spaces in their names. Is there a way to format the file path so that xargs passes it to rm quoted or properly escaped?
Try using:
find . -name vmware-*.log -print0 | xargs -0 rm
This causes find to output a null character after each filename and tells xargs to break up names based on null characters instead of whitespace or other tokens.
Do not use xargs. Find can do it without any help:
find . -name "vmware-*.log" -exec rm '{}' \;
Check out the -0 flag for xargs; combined with find's -print0 you should be set.
find . -name vmware-*.log -print0 | xargs -0 rm
GNU find
find . -name vmware-*.log -delete
find . -name vmware-*.log | xargs -i rm -rf {}
find -iname pattern
use -iname for pattern search
To avoid space issue in xargs I'd use new line character as separator with -d option:
find . -name vmware-*.log | xargs -d '\n' rm