Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Hosting Security and Technology Tutorials : [How To] Delete some specific files from all subdirectories

[juangake]

Hello,

Useful unix-command trick to quickly remove i.e. Thumbs.db files, WS_FTP.LOG files or *.fla files, recursively through directories.

It could be a real pain on a huge directory tree ;-)

Removing all *.fla files from /home/user/ and subdirectories...

# find /home/user/ -name \*.fla -ok rm {} \;

Removing all WS_FTP.LOG files from /home/user and subdirectories...

# find /home/user -name WS_FTP.LOG -ok rm {} \;

Removing all Thumbs.db files from /home/user and subdirectories...

find /home/user -name Thumbs.db -ok rm -f {} \;

Regards,

Juan

[Tailseh]

Thank you for this VERY useful tutorial

[juangake]

Glad you find it useful. Don't know why can't edit the post...

Anyway, just a note...

Using "rm -f" will *not* ask for delete confirmation on every file, as shown on the third example.

[sysgallery]

You can also use:

find /home/user -name Thumbs.db | xargs rm

[ianeeshps]

yes, you can use the command suggested b sysgallery. Normally most of the techs will use that way to avoid again for cofirmation. You should be always safe to list the files by using find and then add he rm part........

[sevryn999]

Thank you, I found that extremely useful!

[LuxuryServers]

So these are files that aren't needed? If im correct.

[prakashck]

Hi,

Your command was ok but change ok to exec and it will fine if you want to do it non interactively (CAREFUL COMMAND IS NON ITERATIVE)

For Removing all *.fla files from /home/user/ and sub directories..

-->>Following command will be the perfect . this will delete the files non interactively.


#find /home/user -name \*.fla -exec rm -rf {} \

-->> Removing all WS_FTP.LOG files from /home/user and subdirectories...(non interactively.)

#find /home -name WS_FTP.LOG -exec rm -f {} \;

-->>Removing all Thumbs.db files from /home/user and subdirectories...

find /home/user -name Thumbs.db -exec rm -f {} \;

[diggo]

@8 that creates too many instances of exec, I prefer find /home/user -name Thumbs.db | xargs rm

[gokujames]

this helped me delete some stupid log files

[cieslakd]

Originally Posted by diggo

@8 that creates too many instances of exec, I prefer find /home/user -name Thumbs.db | xargs rm

You can even skip rm exec by using:

find /home/user -name Thumbs.db -delete

Then just "unlink()" syscall is issued (less overhead than fork() + exec() for /bin/rm).

[vaibhav_p77]

ya thanks it really useful

[JAM3SS]

this is a useful tutorial i will recommend everyone to usethis if they need it!

[infinitnet]

Using xargs is more simple than exec in my opinion.

find /path/to/dir -name "*.html" | xargs rm -f

To force delete every .html file in directory /path/to/dir and all following subdirectories.

[vpsfactory]

That's very useful tutorial. Thanks for this nice share.