Koozali.org: home of the SME Server

Legacy Forums => General Discussion (Legacy) => Topic started by: baw on January 28, 2005, 03:16:47 AM

Title: remove command
Post by: baw on January 28, 2005, 03:16:47 AM

I have a file server that has a shared network drive.  This drive has suddirectories with files within them.  What I need to do is purge *.bak.  Since the drive has over one thousand suddirectories, I need to figure out how to remove the *.bak files within the subs with one command.

Is there a way for me to accomplish this?

Thanks for the help.

BAW

Title: remove command
Post by: mbachmann on January 28, 2005, 08:26:18 AM

Read man rm. The -r option should interest you.

Title: remove command
Post by: baw on January 28, 2005, 04:23:38 PM

I must be missing something here.  I have tried the rm command with the -r, -R, and --recursive options many different ways.

To test the situation, I have set up a temp directory with three subdirectories.  Each subdirectory has two files in it, a .dwg and .bak file.  I am trying to use the rm command as shown:

rm -rf ../temp/*.bak

The only time this works is if I point directly to one of the subdirectories.  I need to remove all of the .bak files in one command.  I use to use a batch file from a windows wkstn.  The server that I am trying to do this on has over a thousand subdirectories under the main dwg directory.

Regards,

BAW

Title: remove command
Post by: Curly on January 28, 2005, 08:38:43 PM

You should try the command find. (pointing to man find)

Something like

cd directory
find .  *.bak -exec /bin/rm {} \;

Test this first of course, rm is very powerfull. You could test by replacing the "/bin/rm" by "ls" which should give you the filenames,

find .  *.bak -exec ls {} \;

or add an -print to get some verbose output:

find .  *.bak -print -exec /bin/rm {} \;