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
Related
I currently use a command that searches a directory and deletes 5 day old files.
find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
I run it from the command line and it works fine. But when I put it in a .sh file it says find /path/to/files*: No such file or directory.
There is only two lines in the shell script:
#! /usr/bin/env bash
find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
How can I rewrite the script so that it works?
`
The error happens if there are currently no files matching the wildcard, presumably because none have been created since you deleted them previously.
The argument to find should be the directory containing the files, not the filenames themselves, since find will automatically search the directory. If you want to restrict the filenames, use the -name option to specify the wildcard.
And if you don't want to go into subdirectories, use the -maxdepth option.
find /path/to -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'files*' -mtime +5 -delete
This works:
#! /usr/bin/env bash
find /home/ubuntu/directory -type f -name 'filename*' -mtime +4 -delete
Here is an example:
find /home/ubuntu/processed -type f -name 'output*' -mtime +4 -delete
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.
I would like to delete specific files if existed but also the directories that contain these files. I do know the files I would like to wipe but not the directories. So far, as I'm new in bash scripting, I think of this :
find ./ -type f -name '*.r*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf &> log_del.txt
find ./ -type f -name '*.c*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf &>> log_del.txt
At the moment, all files named with the specific extensions *.r* and *.c* are deleted.
But the directories are still remaining and also the subdirectories in it, if existed.
I also thought of the option -o in find to delete in one line :
find ./ -type f \( -name '*.r*' -o -name '*.c*' \) -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf &> log_del.txt
How can I do this?
And I also see that my log_del.txt file is empty... :-(
It looks like what you really want is to remove all empty directories, recursively.
find . -type d -delete
-delete processes the directories in child-first order, so that a/b is deleted before a. If a given directory is not empty, find will just display an error and continue.
If the directories remain empty, let rmdir try to remove all of them. It will fail on any directories which have still files.
find ./ -type d -exec rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty {} 2>/dev/null \;
See if this serves your requirement:
find ./ -type f -name '*.r*' -delete -printf "%h\0" | xargs -0 rmdir
If the directory contained any other files, rmdir will fail.
So consider below sample file structure:
$ find a
a/
a/a/
a/a/4
a/b/
a/b/5
a/b/4
a/b/3
a/b/2
a/b/1
$ find a -type f -name '4' -delete -printf "%h\0" | xargs -0 -r rmdir
rmdir: failed to remove ‘a/b’: Directory not empty
$ find a
a
a/b
a/b/5
a/b/3
a/b/2
a/b/1
If in above example, you want to delete directory b also, you can simply use:
$ find ./ -type f -name '*.r*' -printf "%h\0" | xargs -0 rm -rf
EDIT: As per the comment, you (OP) wanted that the empty directory tree should also be deleted. These 2 commands should help you then:
$ find ./ -type f -name '*.r*' -delete # Delete matching files
$ find ./ -empty -type d -delete # Delete tree of empty directories
I need to delete all hidden files in the current folder and its sub folders. Is there any way to do it with a single line command without creating a script?
Use
find "$some_directory" -type f -name '.*' -delete
If you want to remove hidden directories as well, you'll need to take a little more care to avoid . and .., as mentioned by Ronald.
find "$some_directory" -name '.*' ! -name '.' ! -name '..' -delete
With either command, you should run without the -delete primary first, to verify that the list of files/directories that find returns includes only files you really want to delete.
For completeness, I should point out that -delete is a GNU extension to find; the POSIX-compliant command would be
find "$some_directory" -type f -name '.*' -exec rm '{}' \;
i.e., replace -delete with -exec ... \;, with ... replaced with the command line you would use to remove a file, but with the actual file name replaced by '{}'.
For my Netgear Stora, I wanted to remove all the hidden .webview .thumbnails .AppleDouble etc files and folders.
This works from the /home/yourusername/ folder:
find -type f -name '.*' ! -name '.' ! -name '..' -exec rm -fv '{}' \;
and then
find -type d -name '.*' ! -name '.' ! -name '..' -exec rm -frdv '{}' \;
I've got a script that finds files within folders older than 30 days:
find /my/path/*/README.txt -mtime +30
that'll then produce a result such as
/my/path/jobs1/README.txt
/my/path/job2/README.txt
/my/path/job3/README.txt
Now the part I'm stuck at is I'd like to remove the folder + files that are older than 30 days.
find /my/path/*/README.txt -mtime +30 -exec rm -r {} \;
doesn't seem to work. It's only removing the readme.txt file
so ideally I'd like to just remove /job1, /job2, /job3 and any nested files
Can anyone point me in the right direction ?
This would be a safer way:
find /my/path/ -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -type f -name 'README.txt' -mtime +30 -printf '%h\n' | xargs echo rm -r
Remove echo if you find it already correct after seeing the output.
With that you use printf '%h\n' to get the directory of the file, then use xargs to process it.
You can just run the following command in order to recursively remove directories modified more than 30 days ago.
find /my/path/ -type d -mtime +30 -exec rm -rf {} \;