Recursively remove files

Question

Does anyone have a solution to remove those pesky ._ and .DS_Store files that one gets after moving files from a Mac to A Linux Server?

specify a start directory and

Answer 1

cd /var/www/html && find . -name '.DS_Store' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
cd /var/www/html && find . -name '._*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Answer 2

find . -name "FILE-TO-FIND"-exec rm -rf {} \;

Answer 3

Newer findutils supports -delete, so:

find . -name ".DS_Store" -delete

Add -print to also get a list of deletions.

Command will work for you if you have an up-to-date POSIX system, I believe. At least it works for me on OS X 10.8 and works for others who've tested it on macOS 10.12 (Mojave).

Credit to @ephemient in a comment on @X-Istence's post (thought it was helpful enough to warrant its own answer).

Answer 4

You could switch to zsh instead of bash. This lets you use ** to match files anywhere in a directory tree:

$ rm /var/www/html/**/_* /var/www/html/**/.DS_Store

You can also combine them like this:

$ rm /var/www/html/**/(_*|.DS_Store)

Zsh has lots of other features that bash lacks, but that one alone is worth making the switch for. It is available in most (probably all) linux distros, as well as cygwin and OS X.

You can find more information on the zsh site.

Answer 5

It is better to see what is removing by adding -print to this answer

find /var/www/html \( -name '.DS_Store' -or -name '._*' \) -delete -print

Answer 6

change to the directory, and use:

find . -name ".DS_Store" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
find . -name "._*" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

Not tested, try them without the xargs first!

You could replace the period after find, with the directory, instead of changing to the directory first.

find /dir/here ...