How do I remove all files in a folder that start with the same prefix? For example:
I have files:
SVM1.txt
SVM2.csv
SVM3.mat
helloworld.txt
README.txt
I want to delete all the files that start with 'SVM'. Note that they start with the same prefix, but are of different filetype!
With wildcards, of course.
rm SVM*
In addition to the straightforward
rm SVM*
which might fail (command line too long) if there are many, many matching files, you can use
find . -prune -name 'SVM*' -exec rm {} +
which will repeatedly run rm on as many files at a time as possible until all matching files are deleted. -prune keeps find from descending into any subdirectories to find matching files.
In the directory where the files are,
ls | grep '^SVM.*' | xargs rm
Stop at grep ^SVM.* to double check that you have the right files to delete, then add the xargs rm.
Related
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 root folder (03_COMPLETE), inside which are 40 subfolders two levels down (all called CHILD_PNG) that contain .png files I want to rename. There are 6 complete folders I have to go through, with tens of thousands of files. All files are currently named like this: 123456_lifestyle.png, I want them named to lifestyle_123456.png.
My code:
find . -mindepth 2 -type f -iname '*.png' -print0 | xargs -0 /usr/local/bin/rename -v 's/\/([0-9]+)_([A-Za-z]+[0-9])/\/$2_$1/'\;
If I run this on an individual folder of .png files (without using -mindepth) it renames them. However if I run it on the root 03_COMPLETE directory to try and do all the renaming at once, I get lines of errors like this:
Can't rename
'/Volumes/COMMON-LIC-PHOTO/RETOUCHING/04_DELIVERY_PNG/Computer1/03_COMPLETE/06052017_NYS5_W_1263_Output/CHILD_PNG/123456_lifestyle.png'
to
'/Volumes/COMMON-LIC-PHOTO/RETOUCHING/04_DELIVERY_PNG/Computer1/03_COMPLETE/NYS5_06052017_W_1263_Output/CHILD_PNG/123456_lifestyle.png':
No such file or directory
I think it might have something to do with the names of the folder 1 level down (eg. here NYS5_06052017_W_1263_Output) because it did rename on a couple of folders named Bustform_000. Most of the folders though start with a number like 06052017.
I can't figure out why this will work at the .png folder level but won't work on the root folder, and why it will rename in a few folders but most of them it won't.
Also what is weird is that in the error it says it is trying to rename 123456_lifestyle.png to the same filename. Why would it do that? Any ideas?
This might help:
find 03_COMPLETE -type f | xargs -n 1 rename -n 's|/([^_/]*)_([^_/]*).png$|/$2_$1.png|'
Remove -n if output is okay.
You could change directory into each of the CHILD_PNG directories and run a single rename in there on all the files so you don't exec a new rename for every single file:
find 03_COMPLETE -type d -name CHILD_PNG -execdir bash -c "cd {}; rename -n '...' *.png" \;
The issue with your original Regex is, it matches the directory names of the form "xxxxx_yyyyy" and tries to convert them into "yyyyy_xxxxx", which, of course, doesn't exist. Since you're interested in changing only the filenames, and all of them end with .png, you can use the below Regex. Additionally, as you're trying to match a literal '/', you can choose a different character like '|' as delimiter to make the Regex easier to read
's|/([0-9]+)_([A-Za-z]+[0-9]*)(\.[Pp][Nn][Gg])|/$2_$1$3|'
I would like to delete all the emacs backup (~) files from subfolders.
I am aware that I can cd in every single folder and delete them using rm *~ (e.g. for backup file test.cpp~).
How I can delete these files with one command, without cd'ing in every folder?
(I tried rm -r *~ and rm -rf *~ but they don't seem to work)
You can do this with find and exec. Here's an example that does what you want to do:
find -name '*~' -exec rm {} \;
Let's break it down how this works. The find command will recurse through the directory it's executed from, and by default it will print out everything it finds. Using -name '*~' tells us only to select entries whose name matches the regex *~. We have to quote it because otherwise the shell might expand it for us. Using -exec rm {} will execute rm for each thing it finds, with {} as a placeholder for the filename. (The final ; is something required to tell find that this is where the command ends. It's not really a big deal but it'll whine and do nothing if you don't use it. The \ is to escape it because ; is a special shell character.)
find /path/to/directory/ -type f -name '*filtercondition*' -delete
Above command will find the file recursively in the folder matching pattern and delete Files only
You would use find:
find ./ -name *~ -exec rm {} \;
This command will recursively list all files, that match the pattern given for the name. Then it'll execute the command provided for each one of them, substituting the curly braces with the filename.
The only tricky part is the semicolon, as that is closing the command, but it must be protected from bash, hence the backslash.
See https://linux.die.net/man/1/find for more options.
First, the best way to delete these files is to not create them (or rather, create them in a central place): https://stackoverflow.com/a/151946/245173
Here's a way to use find from Emacs to gather a list of files and selectively do operations on them. M-x find-name-dired RET /path/to/files RET *~ RET should get all of the backup files under /path/to/files/ and put them in a dired buffer. Then you can do normal dired things like mark files with m, invert the selection with t, and delete the selection with D.
138.096.000.015.00111-138.096.201.072.38717
138.096.000.015.01008-138.096.201.072.00790
138.096.201.072.00790-138.096.000.015.01008
138.096.201.072.33853-173.194.020.147.00080
138.096.201.072.34293-173.194.034.009.00080
138.096.201.072.38717-138.096.000.015.00111
138.096.201.072.41741-173.194.034.025.00080
138.096.201.072.50612-173.194.034.007.00080
173.194.020.147.00080-138.096.201.072.33853
173.194.034.007.00080-138.096.201.072.50612
173.194.034.009.00080-138.096.201.072.34293
173.194.034.025.00080-138.096.201.072.41741
I have many folders inside which there are many files, the file names are like the above
I want to remove those files with file names having substring "138.096.000"
and sometimes I want to get the list of files with filenames with substring "00080"
To delete files with name containing "138.096.000":
find /root/of/files -type f -name '*138.096.000*' -exec rm {} \;
To list files with names containing "00080":
find /root/of/files -type f -name '*00080*'
rm $(find . -name \*138.096.000\*)
This uses the find command to find the appropriate files. This is executed within a subshell, and the output (the list of files) is used by rm. Note the escaping of the * pattern, since the shell will try and expand * itself.
This assumes you don't have filenames with spaces etc. You may prefer to do something like:
for i in $(find . -name \*138.096.000\*); do
rm $i
done
in this scenario, or even
find . -name \*138.096.000\* | xargs rm
Note that in the loop above you'll execute rm for each file, and the xargs variant will execute rm multiple times (dependin gon the number of files you have - it may only execute once).
However, if you're using zsh then you can simply do:
rm **/*138.096.000*
(I'm assuming your directories aren't named like your files. Note the -f flag as used in Kamil's answer if this is the case)
I have some files with same names but under different directories. For example, path1/filea, path1/fileb, path2/filea, path2/fileb,....
What is the best way to make the files into an archive? Under these directories, there are many other files under these directories that I don't want to make into the archive. Off the top of my head, I think of using Bash, probably ar, tar and other commands, but am not sure how exactly to do it.
Renaming the files seems to make the file names a little complicated. I tend to keep the directory structure inside the archive. Or I might be wrong. Other ideas are welcome!
Thanks and regards!
EDIT:
Examples would be really nice!
you can use tar with --exclude PATTERN option. See the man page for more.
To exclude files, you can see this page for examples.
You may give the find command multiple directories to search through.
# example: create archive of .tex files
find -x LaTeX-files1 LaTeX-files2 -name "*.tex" -print0 | tar --null --no-recursion -uf LaTeXfiles.tar --files-from -
To recursively copy only files with filename "filea" or "fileb" from /path/to/source to /path/to/archive, you could use:
rsync -avm --include='file[ab]' -f 'hide,! */' /path/to/source/ /path/to/archive/
'*/' is a pattern which matches 'any directory'
'! */' matches anything which is not a directory (i.e. a file)
'hide,! */' means hide all files
Filter rules are applied in order, and the first rule that matches is applied.
--include='file[ab]' has precedence, so if a file matches 'file[ab]', it is included.
Any other file gets excluded from the list of files to transfer.
Another alternative is to use the find...exec pattern:
mkdir /path/to/archive
cd /path/to/source
find . -type f -iname "file[ab]" -exec cp --parents '{}' /path/to/archive ";"
What I have used to make a tar ball for the files with same name in different directories is
$find <path> -name <filename> -exec tar -rvf data.tar '{}' \;
i.e. tar [-]r --append
Hope this helps.