i have folders,

ab/cd/ef/001/p.text
ab/cd/ef/002/p.text
ab/cd/ef/003/p.text
ab/cd/ef/004/p.text

These p.text files are not same. Some p.text have line containing "failure". I need a linux command to remove the folder if the file in that folder contains "failure" otherwise don't delete.

Basically want to delete,
001/p.text
002/p.text
003/p.text
004/p.text
only if p.text contains line with word "failure"

This will give you a list of directories that match. Verify that it's working fine, then replace 'echo' with 'rm -r'

Please double check that everything is fine before actually deleting, also make sure to backup!

if you have GNU grep

Hi,

thanks for your reply..

I tried but it said illegal name?? do i need to define i?

$ find . -name f.dat -exec grep -q nopace {}\; -print | while read i ; do echo $(dirname "$i" ) ; done
Illegal variable name.

thanks for your reply. i got following reply?

$ grep -l "nopace" /path/test2/white/0*/f.dat | xargs -i cp '{}' /temp/
grep: No match.

The message says this: The shell tries to expand /path/test2/white/0*/f.dat before passing the argument list to grep, but there's no matching file or directory. maybe you should adapt the pattern; e.g., using p.text.

You might not like the result if the above line worked: It would copy all "f.dat" files that contain "nopace" into "/temp/".

• I think you're looking for "failure" not "nopace"
• You typically don't have "/temp", only "/tmp".
• As they all have the same name, every "f.dat" would overwrite the previous one. You'd end up with a copy of just the last matching in /temp/f.dat
• Well, it doesn't remove anything, certainly not not the parent directories :-)

You didn't tell us enough about your folders. If there are just the 4 you mention,
Adapt the pattern to your situation. Before unlinking, rm will ask you for each file. When you're sure it does the right thing, you can omit the "i" option.