I\'m trying to do something which is probably very simple, I have a directory structure such as:
dir/
subdir1/
subdir2/
file1
file2
find dir -type f -exec rm {} \;
where dir is the top level of where you want to delete files from
Note that this will only delete regular files, not symlinks, not devices, etc. If you want to delete everything except directories, use
find dir -not -type d -exec rm {} \;
find dir -type f -exec rm '{}' +
With GNU's find
you can use the -delete
action:
find dir -type f -delete
With standard find
you can use -exec rm
:
find dir -type f -exec rm {} +
find dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
find
lists all files that match certain expression in a given directory, recursively. -type f
matches regular files. -print0
is for printing out names using \0
as delimiter (as any other character, including \n
, might be in a path name). xargs
is for gathering the file names from standard input and putting them as a parameters. -0
is to make sure xargs
will understand the \0
delimiter.
xargs
is wise enough to call rm
multiple times if the parameter list would get too big. So it is much better than trying to call sth. like rm $((find ...)
. Also it much faster than calling rm
for each file by itself, like find ... -exec rm \{\}
.