I have a script using a for loop that would rename folders and files. The script would take the list of files and folders and rename them conditionally. I would invoke the file using the command:
find test/* -exec ./replace.sh {} \;
My replace.sh script would contain something similar to:
for i in $#
mv $OLDFILE $NEWFILE
done
$OLDFILE and $NEWFILE has been set previously and I don't believe any problems will arise from them.
My problem arises when I hit upon subdirectories. Originally, I would have folders like:
folder_1
-file1
-file2
When my script changes folder_1 into folderX1, the next argument, folder_1/file1 woudl be invalid as the changed path would be folderX1/file1. I figured I could create a stack with a list of folders that is being changed and pop them out later to rename the files but this seems hard on bash. Is there a better method that I am missing?
P.S I could run the program several times to go through all the subdirectories but this doesn't seem efficient.
You can add -depth to the find command. This will process the directory's files before the directory itself. See man find for details.
Your find usage is problematic. The first option is the start location for the search, so you don't want to use a glob there. If you want only the files in test/ and not any of its subdirectories, use the -depth option, as Olaf suggested.
You don't really need to use a separate script to handle this rename. It can be done within the find command line, if you don't mind a little mess.
To handle just the top-level of files, you could do this:
$ touch foo.txt bar.txt baz.ext
$ find test -depth 1 -type f -name \*.txt -exec bash -c 'f="{}"; mv -v "{}" "${f/.txt/.csv}"' \;
./foo.txt -> ./foo.csv
./bar.txt -> ./bar.csv
$
But your concern is valid -- find will build a list of matches, and if your -exec changes the list out from under find, some renames will fail.
I suspect your quickest solution is to do this in TWO stages (not several): one for files, followed by one for directories. (Or change the order, I don't think it should matter.)
$ mkdir foo_1; touch red_2 foo_1/blue_3
$ find . -type f -name \*_\* -exec bash -c 'f="{}"; mv -v "{}" "${f%_?}X${f##*_}"' \;
./foo_1/blue_3 -> ./foo_1/blueX3
./red_2 -> ./redX2
$ find . -type d -name \*_\* -exec bash -c 'f="{}"; mv -v "{}" "${f%_?}X${f##*_}"' \;
./foo_1 -> ./fooX1
Bash parameter expansion will get you a long way.
Another option, depending on your implementation of find, is the -d option:
-d Cause find to perform a depth-first traversal, i.e., directories
are visited in post-order and all entries in a directory will be
acted on before the directory itself. By default, find visits
directories in pre-order, i.e., before their contents. Note, the
default is not a breadth-first traversal.
So:
$ mkdir -p foo_1/bar_2; touch red_3 foo_1/blue_4 foo_1/bar_2/green_5
$ find . -d -name \*_\* -exec bash -c 'f="{}"; mv -v "{}" "${f%_?}X${f##*_}"' \;
./foo_1/bar_2/green_5 -> ./foo_1/bar_2/greenX5
./foo_1/bar_2 -> ./foo_1/barX2
./foo_1/blue_4 -> ./foo_1/blueX4
./foo_1 -> ./fooX1
./red_3 -> ./redX3
$
I have a folder /var/backup where a cronjob saves a backup of a database/filesystem. It contains a latest.gz.zip and lots of older dumps which are names timestamp.gz.zip.
The folder ist getting bigger and bigger and I would like to create a bash script that does the following:
Keep latest.gz.zip
Keep the youngest 10 files
Delete all other files
Unfortunately, I'm not a good bash scripter so I have no idea where to start. Thanks for your help.
In zsh you can do most of it with expansion flags:
files=(*(.Om))
rm $files[1,-9]
Be careful with this command, you can check what matches were made with:
print -rl -- $files[1,-9]
You should learn to use the find command, possibly with xargs, that is something similar to
find /var/backup -type f -name 'foo' -mtime -20 -delete
or if your find doesn't have -delete:
find /var/backup -type f -name 'foo' -mtime -20 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f
Of course you'll need to improve a lot, this is just to give ideas.
I have a set of plain text files spread across 400+ directories, with tons and tons of subdirectories. There are about 300,000 text files. For example:
directory1/subdirectory1
directory1/subdirectory2
directory1/subdirectory1/subdirectory3
All of those text files within directory1 should end up in one big massive text file named directory1.txt. Then repeat with directory2.
What would be the quickest and simplest way to go into each of these four hundred directories and combine all of the text files in such a manner?
I know I could go to each of the four hundred directories and use the commands such as find to bring all the text files together into one directory, and then use cat *.txt >> all.txt, but surely there must be an easy way to automate this process?
To concatenate all txt-files in a subtree:
#!/bin/sh
# Usage: cat-txt dirname
find "$1" -name \*.txt -print0 | xargs -0 cat >> "$1.txt"
Call cat-txt on all immediate subdirectories:
$ find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec cat-txt '{}' \;
I've tested this on my system, and it works flawlessly. You may want to tweak it to your parameters, but in one line I did everything you needed.
for I in `ls -dR */`; do cat $I/* > $I.txt; done
You may to change the ls command to only search text files, otherwise you'll get binary data as well. Enjoy.
for I in `ls -dR */*.txt`; do cat $I/* > $I.txt; done
there must be an easy way to automate this process?
Why are you looking for one? Is this a one time activity or you're gonna repeat it every now and then?
I would just say go with something as simple as:
for ff in `find . -maxdepth 1 -type d`
do
find "$ff" -type *.txt -exec cat {} \; >> "$ff.txt"
done
When using sudo rm -r, how can I delete all files, with the exception of the following:
textfile.txt
backup.tar.gz
script.php
database.sql
info.txt
find [path] -type f -not -name 'textfile.txt' -not -name 'backup.tar.gz' -delete
If you don't specify -type f find will also list directories, which you may not want.
Or a more general solution using the very useful combination find | xargs:
find [path] -type f -not -name 'EXPR' -print0 | xargs -0 rm --
for example, delete all non txt-files in the current directory:
find . -type f -not -name '*txt' -print0 | xargs -0 rm --
The print0 and -0 combination is needed if there are spaces in any of the filenames that should be deleted.
rm !(textfile.txt|backup.tar.gz|script.php|database.sql|info.txt)
The extglob (Extended Pattern Matching) needs to be enabled in BASH (if it's not enabled):
shopt -s extglob
find . | grep -v "excluded files criteria" | xargs rm
This will list all files in current directory, then list all those that don't match your criteria (beware of it matching directory names) and then remove them.
Update: based on your edit, if you really want to delete everything from current directory except files you listed, this can be used:
mkdir /tmp_backup && mv textfile.txt backup.tar.gz script.php database.sql info.txt /tmp_backup/ && rm -r && mv /tmp_backup/* . && rmdir /tmp_backup
It will create a backup directory /tmp_backup (you've got root privileges, right?), move files you listed to that directory, delete recursively everything in current directory (you know that you're in the right directory, do you?), move back to current directory everything from /tmp_backup and finally, delete /tmp_backup.
I choose the backup directory to be in root, because if you're trying to delete everything recursively from root, your system will have big problems.
Surely there are more elegant ways to do this, but this one is pretty straightforward.
I prefer to use sub query list:
rm -r `ls | grep -v "textfile.txt\|backup.tar.gz\|script.php\|database.sql\|info.txt"`
-v, --invert-match select non-matching lines
\| Separator
Assuming that files with those names exist in multiple places in the directory tree and you want to preserve all of them:
find . -type f ! -regex ".*/\(textfile.txt\|backup.tar.gz\|script.php\|database.sql\|info.txt\)" -delete
You can use GLOBIGNORE environment variable in Bash.
Suppose you want to delete all files except php and sql, then you can do the following -
export GLOBIGNORE=*.php:*.sql
rm *
export GLOBIGNORE=
Setting GLOBIGNORE like this ignores php and sql from wildcards used like "ls *" or "rm *". So, using "rm *" after setting the variable will delete only txt and tar.gz file.
Since nobody mentioned it:
copy the files you don't want to delete in a safe place
delete all the files
move the copied files back in place
You can write a for loop for this... %)
for x in *
do
if [ "$x" != "exclude_criteria" ]
then
rm -f $x;
fi
done;
A little late for the OP, but hopefully useful for anyone who gets here much later by google...
I found the answer by #awi and comment on -delete by #Jamie Bullock really useful. A simple utility so you can do this in different directories ignoring different file names/types each time with minimal typing:
rm_except (or whatever you want to name it)
#!/bin/bash
ignore=""
for fignore in "$#"; do
ignore=${ignore}"-not -name ${fignore} "
done
find . -type f $ignore -delete
e.g. to delete everything except for text files and foo.bar:
rm_except *.txt foo.bar
Similar to #mishunika, but without the if clause.
If you're using zsh which I highly recommend.
rm -rf ^file/folder pattern to avoid
With extended_glob
setopt extended_glob
rm -- ^*.txt
rm -- ^*.(sql|txt)
Trying it worked with:
rm -r !(Applications|"Virtualbox VMs"|Downloads|Documents|Desktop|Public)
but names with spaces are (as always) tough. Tried also with Virtualbox\ VMs instead the quotes. It deletes always that directory (Virtualbox VMs).
Just:
rm $(ls -I "*.txt" ) #Deletes file type except *.txt
Or:
rm $(ls -I "*.txt" -I "*.pdf" ) #Deletes file types except *.txt & *.pdf
Make the files immutable. Not even root will be allowed to delete them.
chattr +i textfile.txt backup.tar.gz script.php database.sql info.txt
rm *
All other files have been deleted.
Eventually you can reset them mutable.
chattr -i *
I belive you can use
rm -v !(filename)
Except for the filename all the other files will e deleted in the directory and make sure you are using it in
This is similar to the comment from #siwei-shen but you need the -o flag to do multiple patterns. The -o flag stands for 'or'
find . -type f -not -name '*ignore1' -o -not -name '*ignore2' | xargs rm
You can do this with two command sequences.
First define an array with the name of the files you do not want to exclude:
files=( backup.tar.gz script.php database.sql info.txt )
After that, loop through all files in the directory you want to exclude, checking if the filename is in the array you don't want to exclude; if its not then delete the file.
for file in *; do
if [[ ! " ${files[#]} " ~= "$file" ]];then
rm "$file"
fi
done
The answer I was looking for was to run script, but I wanted to avoid deleting the sript itself. So incase someone is looking for a similar answer, do the following.
Create a .sh file and write the following code:
cp my_run_build.sh ../../
rm -rf * cp
../../my_run_build.sh .
/*amend rest of the script*/
Since no one yet mentioned this, in one particular case:
OLD_FILES=`echo *`
... create new files ...
rm -r $OLD_FILES
(or just rm $OLD_FILES)
or
OLD_FILES=`ls *`
... create new files ...
rm -r $OLD_FILES
You may need to use shopt -s nullglob if some files may be either there or not there:
SET_OLD_NULLGLOB=`shopt -p nullglob`
shopt -s nullglob
FILES=`echo *.sh *.bash`
$SET_OLD_NULLGLOB
without nullglob, echo *.sh *.bash may give you "a.sh b.sh *.bash".
(Having said all that, I myself prefer this answer, even though it does not work in OSX)
Rather than going for a direct command, please move required files to temp dir outside current dir. Then delete all files using rm * or rm -r *.
Then move required files to current dir.
Remove everything exclude file.name:
ls -d /path/to/your/files/* |grep -v file.name|xargs rm -rf
I know this is probably elementary to unix people, but I haven't found a straightforward answer online.
I have a directory with sub-directories. Some of these sub-dirs have .mov files in them. I want to consolidate all the movs to a single directory. I don't need to worry about file naming conflicts because the files are from a digital camera and it names the files incrementally, but divides them into daily folders.
What is the Unix-fu for grabbing all these files and copying (or even better, moving them) to a directory in my home folder?
Thanks.
How about this?
find "$SOURCE_DIRECTORY" -type f -name '*.mov' -exec mv '{}' "$TARGET_DIRECTORY" ';'
If the source and target directories do not overlap this should work fine.
EDIT:
BTW, if you have mixed-case extensions (x.mov, y.Mov, Z.MOV) as is the case with many cameras, this would be better. It uses -iname which is case-insensitive when matching:
find "$SOURCE_DIRECTORY" -type f -iname '*.mov' -exec mv '{}' "$TARGET_DIRECTORY" ';'
Make sure to replace the $SOURCE_DIRECTORY and $TARGET_DIRECTORY variables with the actual directories and that they do not overlap (i.e. the target being somewhere under the source)
EDIT 2:
PS: I just noticed that khachik caught this one with his edit
mv `find . -name "*.mov" | xargs` OUTPUTDIR/
Update after thkala's comment:
find . -iname "*.mov" | while read line; do mv "$line" OUTPUTDIR/; done
If you need to cope with weird filenames (spaces, special characters), try this:
$ cd <source parent directory>
$ find -name '*.mov' -print0 | xargs -0 echo mv -v -t <target directory>
Remove the "echo" above to actually do the move, rather than print what would happen.
"mv -v" gives verbose output, "mv -t ..." specifies the target directory (possibly GNU-specific).
"-print0" and "-0" are extensions to cope with weird filenames. On non-GNU systems you might need to remove those options, which will result in newline-separated data. This will still work on filenames with spaces, but not filenames with newlines (yes, it's possible).