Skip to main content

Recursively deleting folders on linux

Had this problem to resolve the other day. I had a fairly deep directory structure - and at the "end" of each path, there was one empty folder to delete. Thank you dreamweaver, but I don't need a _notes folder in every directory on my site!

So, rather than delete this manually from every directory - on both the live and staging server, I figured there had to be a way to do this in one command on linux. Of course, I had to be careful, since you can see all sorts of ways that this could go wrong with recursively deleting folders!

First, I made backups- always key when doing something like this. I just made a quick tar in my home dir, from the root of the directory I was working on:
tar -cf ~/backup.tar

Then, knowing I could fairly easily restore things that went wrong, I found the command I needed to delete the offending folders.
find . -name "_notes" -exec rm -rf {} \;

So the key here is the find command, which looks through all the directories below the current directory for files/directories called "_notes" - and then executes the command to delete the file (the -exec rm -rf part). Worked like a charm!
Also, if you want to have it ask you before deleting each file, you can add the "-i" parameter to the rm command:
find ./ -name "_notes" -exec rm -rfi {} ;
And it's only fair to point out that I figured this out from this post. Google comes through again!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Another VI tip - using macros, an example

God I love VI. Well, actually, vim but whatever. Here's another reason why. Suppose you need to perform some repetitive task over and over, such as updating the copyright date in the footer of a static website. (Yes, yes I know you could do a javascript thing or whatever, just bear with me.) Of course you could just search and replace in some text editor, changing "2007" to "2008" (if you're stupid) - and you'll end up with a bunch of incorrect dates being changed, most likely. What you need to do is only change that date at the bottom. And suppose that because of the formatting, you can't use the "Copy" part of the string in a search replace - perhaps some of the pages use "©", some spell out "Copyright" etc. This is where vi macros come in handy. A macro in vi is exactly what you expect, it records your actions and allows you to play them back. To start recording, press q followed by a character to use to "stor...

Cleaning content from OpenOffice using Perl

Open office is great software for a number of things - I use it as my office software instead of paying a premium for Microsoft office. But one thing it's not so hot at is converting documents to clean HTML. And one of the main things I use it for is adding content to sites that clients send me in word files or excel spreadsheets. Of course, you can always cut and paste, but that loses a lot of formatting. For example, if the content uses a lot of italics, bold text, etc. it can be a huge pain to go back and put all that back in. Another common situation is a client sending some sort of tablular data in a spreadsheet - for example a list of events. It's the kind of data that can change a lot, and it also needs to be in a table with some decent formatting to be usable. Doing it manually is a lot of grunt work. But grunt work is what computers excel at, and I'm not very good at. So I've developed a number of perl scripts to help streamline this kind of job. I'll go ...

Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in...