Ive had a look around and I'm having a little bit of trouble with the find and delte command, I dont know how to make the recurrsive (if thats the right word, I mean go into every folder and execute)

like the:

delete /s command in windows.



and also I dont know how to use the find command to find a file recurrsivly, and how to excluse certain extentions.

eg: I want to find all files in a folder + subfolders that dont end with .mp3, .wma, or .m4a

would this be:
find /Music/*.* !name-*.mp3 !name-*.wma !name-*.m4a

??

Thanks for your help in advance

This might work:
find /Music -r -type f -name "<filename>.*"--exclude .mp3 --exclude .wma -exec rm -f {} \;

where:
/Music is the top level directory to begin.
-r is recursive
-type f means regular file, as opposed to binary, block, etc.
-name "<filename>" is the basename of the file in quotes
exclude selected by file extension
-exec rm -f {} \; to remove the matches to the search pattern after the excluded files are de-selected.

More experienced heads will probably give you a more elegant solution.

Before trying this on your system, I'd suggest making a test directory with test files (same name, different extensions) and run the find command given above on the test directory to be certain it will work as expected.

when i tried:
find /Music -r -type f --exclude .mp3 --exclude .wma | grep '*.*'
i got: find: invalid predicate `-r'

when i got rid of -r
i got: find: invalid predicate `--exclude'


when i tried:
find Music/ -type f | grep '*.*'

it seemed to run for a second and then finish, printing no results

My bad. Mixed parts of two commands. I apologize.

find /Music -type f -maxdepth 3 | grep 'filename' --exclude .mp3 --exclude .wma | -exec rm -f {} \;

maxdepth 3 (search three levels down)
You may have to enclose the excluded pattern in quotes. Try it both ways.

Make a test directory with test files (same name; different extensions) to test this on to verify that it will work.

ok i worked it out:

find -not -name *.mp3 -a -not -name *.m4a -a -not -name *.wma

would get what I wanted, and this could also be used to delte the files by using the find commands ability to execute stuff to the files it finds.

Thanks

And I've learned yet another variation on the theme of 'find and delete'. Thank you.

I think I might have to make an alias for it just so i can type "searchanddestroy" in at command line for it :P