CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macoscommand-line
Evanss
Evanss

Reputation: 23553

Delete nested subdirectories by name on Mac?

How can I delete all subdirectories of a certain name via the command line on mac?

Eg if I have

/parent/foo
/parent/child/foo
/parent/child/child2/foo

How can I run a command from /parent that will delete any folder called foo and all of it's contense?

Ive tried this command but no luck:

find . -type d -name foo -delete

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2514

Answers (2)

CRD
CRD

Reputation: 53000

Using find you can do:

find . -d -type d -name a -exec rm -r {} \;

As you have discovered -delete does not appear to delete non-empty directories (so its equivalent to rmdir not rm -r), though this may not be documented.

The -exec executes a command, {} is replaced by the matching pathname, and \; marks the end of the command. So this does a recursive removal of every matching path.

The -d sets depth first traversal which means directories are processed after their contents. If you omit this find will first remove the directory and then try to recurse into it – this results in error messages but still works.

There is a shorter way using zsh:

rm -r **/a

The pattern ** does a search an matches a at any depth.

If zsh is not your default shell you can use its -c argument to run a command from another shell:

zsh -c 'rm -r **/a'

HTH

Upvotes: 3

Haxername
Haxername

Reputation: 9

The name of the directory has to be in quotes. Do the following:

find . -type d -name "foo" -delete

Upvotes: -1

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