I'm using this command to try and delete all Thumbs.db files in a very large folder. I thought -f should force deletion without asking for confirmation, but i'm still being prompted for "y" or "n" on every file.
find "megapacks" -name Thumbs.db -ok rm -f {} \;
I tried type rm to see if there was an alias and it responded with
rm is aliased to `rm -i'
I tried using /bin/rm instead but i'm still being prompted
find "megapacks" -name Thumbs.db -ok /bin/rm -f {} \;
Does anyone have another idea for how to avoid the confirmation?
Problem is with -ok option that is as per man find:
Like -exec but ask the user first. If the user agrees, run the command. Otherwise just return false.
This should work for you with -exec:
find "megapacks" -name Thumbs.db -exec /bin/rm -f {} \;
or faster:
find "megapacks" -name Thumbs.db -exec /bin/rm -f {} +
But I think the problem is that you pass -ok to find, which is
Like -exec but ask the user first.
If the alias were the problem, simply unset the alias:
unalias rm
Note that this only affect the current shell session.
You can also use the -delete option for find:
find "megapacks" -name Thumbs.db -delete
I am deleting the files in all the directories and subdirectories using the command below:
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
But I want to know which are the files deleted along with their paths. How can I do this?
Simply add a -print argument to your find.
$ find . -type f -name "*.txt" -print -exec rm -f {} \;
As noted by #JonathanRoss below, you can achieve an equivalent result with the -v option to rm.
It's not the scope of your question, but more generally it gets more interesting if you want to delete directories recursively. Then:
a simple -exec rm -r argument keeps it silent
a -print -exec rm -r argument reports the toplevel directories you're operating on
a -exec rm -rv argument reports all you're removing
I have directories named as:
2012-12-12
2012-10-12
2012-08-08
How would I delete the directories that are older than 10 days with a bash shell script?
This will do it recursively for you:
find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;
Explanation:
find: the unix command for finding files / directories / links etc.
/path/to/base/dir: the directory to start your search in.
-type d: only find directories
-ctime +10: only consider the ones with modification time older than 10 days
-exec ... \;: for each such result found, do the following command in ...
rm -rf {}: recursively force remove the directory; the {} part is where the find result gets substituted into from the previous part.
Alternatively, use:
find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -ctime +10 | xargs rm -rf
Which is a bit more efficient, because it amounts to:
rm -rf dir1 dir2 dir3 ...
as opposed to:
rm -rf dir1; rm -rf dir2; rm -rf dir3; ...
as in the -exec method.
With modern versions of find, you can replace the ; with + and it will do the equivalent of the xargs call for you, passing as many files as will fit on each exec system call:
find . -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} +
If you want to delete all subdirectories under /path/to/base, for example
/path/to/base/dir1
/path/to/base/dir2
/path/to/base/dir3
but you don't want to delete the root /path/to/base, you have to add -mindepth 1 and -maxdepth 1 options, which will access only the subdirectories under /path/to/base
-mindepth 1 excludes the root /path/to/base from the matches.
-maxdepth 1 will ONLY match subdirectories immediately under /path/to/base such as /path/to/base/dir1, /path/to/base/dir2 and /path/to/base/dir3 but it will not list subdirectories of these in a recursive manner. So these example subdirectories will not be listed:
/path/to/base/dir1/dir1
/path/to/base/dir2/dir1
/path/to/base/dir3/dir1
and so forth.
So , to delete all the sub-directories under /path/to/base which are older than 10 days;
find /path/to/base -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -ctime +10 | xargs rm -rf
find supports -delete operation, so:
find /base/dir/* -ctime +10 -delete;
I think there's a catch that the files need to be 10+ days older too. Haven't tried, someone may confirm in comments.
The most voted solution here is missing -maxdepth 0 so it will call rm -rf for every subdirectory, after deleting it. That doesn't make sense, so I suggest:
find /base/dir/* -maxdepth 0 -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;
The -delete solution above doesn't use -maxdepth 0 because find would complain the dir is not empty. Instead, it implies -depth and deletes from the bottom up.
I was struggling to get this right using the scripts provided above and some other scripts especially when files and folder names had newline or spaces.
Finally stumbled on tmpreaper and it has been worked pretty well for us so far.
tmpreaper -t 5d ~/Downloads
tmpreaper --protect '*.c' -t 5h ~/my_prg
Original Source link
Has features like test, which checks the directories recursively and lists them.
Ability to delete symlinks, files or directories and also the protection mode for a certain pattern while deleting
OR
rm -rf `find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -mtime +10`
Updated, faster version of it:
find /path/to/base/dir/* -mtime +10 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f
I'm trying to recursive erase all files that begin with "._" (aka mac dot files) on my server using SSH.
The files are listed with a ls -a but this won't work:
rm -rf ._*
I know there's a way. Mind to share?
Cheers!
find . -name ._\* -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f
find . -name ._\* -type f -delete
Specify that it's files and just call the find-delete on item directly.
find . -name ._\* -exec rm -f {} \;
by the way rm -rf is for removing directories recursively
I've renamed some files in a fairly large project and want to remove the .pyc files they've left behind. I tried the bash script:
rm -r *.pyc
But that doesn't recurse through the folders as I thought it would. What am I doing wrong?
find . -name "*.pyc" -exec rm -f {} \;
find . -name '*.pyc' -type f -delete
Surely the simplest.
Add to your ~/.bashrc:
pyclean () {
find . -type f -name "*.py[co]" -delete
find . -type d -name "__pycache__" -delete
}
This removes all .pyc and .pyo files, and __pycache__ directories. It's also very fast.
Usage is simply:
$ cd /path/to/directory
$ pyclean
In current version of debian you have pyclean script which is in python-minimal package.
Usage is simple:
pyclean .
If you're using bash >=4.0 (or zsh)
rm **/*.pyc
Note that */*.pyc selects all .pyc files in the immediate first-level subdirectories while **/*.pyc recursively scans the whole directory tree. As an example, foo/bar/qux.pyc will be deleted by rm **/*.pyc but not by */*.pyc.
The globstar shell options must be enabled. To enable globstar:
shopt -s globstar
and to check its status:
shopt globstar
For windows users:
del /S *.pyc
I used to use an alias for that:
$ which pycclean
pycclean is aliased to `find . -name "*.pyc" | xargs -I {} rm -v "{}"'
find . -name '*.pyc' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
The find recursively looks for *.pyc files. The xargs takes that list of names and sends it to rm. The -print0 and the -0 tell the two commands to seperate the filenames with null characters. This allows it to work correctly on file names containing spaces, and even a file name containing a new line.
The solution with -exec works, but it spins up a new copy of rm for every file. On a slow system or with a great many files, that'll take too long.
You could also add a couple more args:
find . -iname '*.pyc' -print0 | xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty rm
iname adds case insensitivity, like *.PYC . The no-run-if-empty keeps you from getting an error from rm if you have no such files.
$ find . -name '*.pyc' -delete
This is faster than
$ find . -name "*.pyc" -exec rm -rf {} \;
Further, people usually want to remove all *.pyc, *.pyo files and __pycache__ directories recursively in the current directory.
Command:
find . | grep -E "(__pycache__|\.pyc|\.pyo$)" | xargs rm -rf
Django Extension
Note: This answer is very specific to Django project that have already been using Django Extension.
python manage.py clean_pyc
The implementation can be viewed in its source code.
Just to throw another variant into the mix, you can also use backquotes like this:
rm `find . -name *.pyc`
full recursive
ll **/**/*.pyc
rm **/**/*.pyc
Now there is a package pyclean on PyPI, which is easy to use, and cross-platform. User just need a simple command line to clean all __pycache__ files in current dir:
pyclean .
if you don't want .pyc anymore you can use this single line in a terminal:
export PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1
if you change your mind:
unset PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE
First run:
find . -type f -name "*.py[c|o]" -exec rm -f {} +
Then add:
export PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1
To ~/.profile
rm -r recurses into directories, but only the directories you give to rm. It will also delete those directories. One solution is:
for i in $( find . -name *.pyc )
do
rm $i
done
find will find all *.pyc files recursively in the current directory, and the for loop will iterate through the list of files found, removing each one.
find . -name "*.pyc"|xargs rm -rf
If you want to delete all the .pyc files from the project folder.
First, you have
cd <path/to/the/folder>
then find all the .pyc file and delete.
find . -name \*.pyc -delete
You can run find . -name "*.pyc" -type f -delete.
But use it with precaution. Run first find . -name "*.pyc" -type f to see exactly which files you will remove.
In addition, make sure that -delete is the last argument in your command. If you put it before the -name *.pyc argument, it will delete everything.
To delete all the python compiled files in current directory.
find . -name "__pycache__"|xargs rm -rf
find . -name "*.pyc"|xargs rm -rf
If you want remove all *.pyc files and __pycache__ directories recursively in the current directory:
with python:
import os
os.popen('find . | grep -E "(__pycache__|\.pyc|\.pyo$)" | xargs rm -rf')
or manually with terminal or cmd:
find . | grep -E "(__pycache__|\.pyc|\.pyo$)" | xargs rm -rf
py3clean works for me!
cd /usr/local/lib/python3.9
sudo py3clean -v .
Had to add a few ignore params on M1:
pyclean --verbose . --ignore "Library",".Trash"