CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellgnu-findutils
Yves
Yves

Reputation: 12371

How to delete all subdirectories with a specific name

I'm working on Linux and there is a folder, which contains lots of sub directories. I need to delete all of sub directories which have a same name. For example,

dir
 |---subdir1
 |---subdir2
 |     |-----subdir1
 |---file

I want to delete all of subdir1. Here is my script:

find dir -type d -name "subdir1" | while read directory ; do
    rm -rf $directory
done

However, I execute it but it seems that nothing happens.

I've tried also find dir -type d "subdir1" -delete, but still, nothing happens.

Upvotes: 8

Views: 10093

Answers (4)

Pandya's Bot
Pandya's Bot

Reputation: 49

From the question, it seems you've tried to use while with find. The following substitution may help you:

while IFS= read -rd '' dir; do rm -rf "$dir"; done < <(find dir -type d -name "subdir" -print0)

Upvotes: 0

Benjamin W.
Benjamin W.

Reputation: 52112

With the globstar option (enable with shopt -s globstar, requires Bash 4.0 or newer):

rm -rf **/subdir1/

The drawback of this solution as compared to using find -exec or find | xargs is that the argument list might become too long, but that would require quite a lot of directories named subdir1. On my system, ARG_MAX is 2097152.

Upvotes: 7

ilkkachu
ilkkachu

Reputation: 6517

If find finds the correct directories at all, these should work:

find dir -type d -name "subdir1" -exec echo rm -rf {} \;

or

find dir -type d -name "subdir1" -exec echo rm -rf {} +

(the echo is there for verifying the command hits the files you wanted, remove it to actually run the rm and remove the directories.)

Both piping to xargs and to while read have the downside that unusual file names will cause issues. Also, find -delete will only try to remove the directories themselves, not their contents. It will fail on any non-empty directories (but you should at least get errors).

With xargs, spaces separate words by default, so even file names with spaces will not work. read can deal with spaces, but in your command it's the unquoted expansion of $tar that splits the variable on spaces.

If your filenames don't have newlines or trailing spaces, this should work, too:

find ... | while read -r x ; do rm -rf "$x" ; done

Upvotes: 16

Kent
Kent

Reputation: 195029

Using xargs:

find dir -type d  -name "subdir1" -print0 |xargs -0 rm -rf

Some information not directly related to the question/problem:

find|xargs or find -exec

https://www.everythingcli.org/find-exec-vs-find-xargs/

Upvotes: 2

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