CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashmacoscommand
Daniel Batalla
Daniel Batalla

Reputation: 1264

Command to empty many files recursively

I would like to clear the content of many log files of a given directory recursively, without deleting every file. Is that possible with a simple command?

I know that I can do > logs/logfile.log one by one, but there are lots of logs in that folder, and that is not straightforward.

I am using macOS Sierra by the way.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 699

Answers (2)

Mark Setchell
Mark Setchell

Reputation: 208077

As macOS includes Perl anyway:

perl -e 'for(<logs/*log>){truncate $_,0}'

Or, more succinctly, if you use homebrew and you have installed GNU Parallel (which is just a Perl script), you can do:

parallel '>' ::: logs/*log

Upvotes: 1

Eric Renouf
Eric Renouf

Reputation: 14520

Thanks to @chepner for showing me the better way to protect against double quotes in the file names:

You can use find to do it

find start_dir -type f -exec sh -c '> "$1"' _ {} \;

And you could add extra restrictions if you don't want all files, like if you want only files ending in .log you could do 

find start_dir -type f -name '*.log' -exec sh -c '> "$1"' _ {} \;

Upvotes: 4

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