delete all except three specified directories

supulton · 07-29-2010, 03:29 AM

How would I delete everything in a directory except for three specified directories?

So far I discovered I can omit the directories like so in a find search:

Code:

find . -type d \( -name media -o -name images -o -name backups \) -prune -o -print

But if I pass the '-delete' parameter, I get the error:

Code:

find: The -delete action atomatically turns on -depth, but -prune does nothing when -depth is in effect.  If you want to carry on anyway, just explicitly use the -depth option.

Any takers?

vinaytp · 07-29-2010, 04:21 AM

Hi supulton,

Is this OKay ?

Code:

ls | sed 's/test1\|test2\|test3//' | xargs rm -r -f

where test1,test2 and test3 are the directories which needs to be preserved from deletion..

unSpawn · 07-29-2010, 04:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by supulton

Any takers?

Pipe 'find' output (not 'ls'!) through 'xargs'.

druuna · 07-29-2010, 04:34 AM

Hi,

A little warning:

If media, images and/or backups are in a subdirectory they will be removed even if you "exclude" them!!

I.e.:
You are standing here:

/temp

Directory structure looks like this:

/temp/dira
/temp/dira/images

Even though you exclude images, its parent (dira) is _not_ excluded and find will pass this directory to rm -r/delete and all (including all subdirs) will be removed.

Hope this helps.

vinaytp · 07-29-2010, 04:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by unSpawn

Pipe 'find' output (not 'ls'!) through 'xargs'.

It works both ways..As we are using -r switch in rm command

In fact if we use find instead of ls we get following warnings, although it performs the required task

Code:

[vinay@localhost workspace]$ find . | sed 's/test1\|test2\|test3//' | xargs rm -r -f
rm: cannot remove directory `.'
rm: cannot remove directory `./'
rm: cannot remove directory `./'
rm: cannot remove directory `./'

ghostdog74 · 07-29-2010, 05:12 AM

Bash 4

Code:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
for dir in **/; do  
  case "$dir" in
   *dir1*|*dir2*|*dir3* ) continue;;
   *) 
       echo rm -rf "$dir"
  esac
done

unSpawn · 07-29-2010, 05:19 AM

Use the real path as in 'find $PWD -args' or 'find `readlink -f .` -args' instead? BTW I'm saying "not ls" since these commands may or may not work in similar ways when executed from the command line as 'ls' often will be set as an alias. Besides 'find' output has not problem with IFS whitespace ("-print0" vs 'ls --quoting-style=c') and is infinitely more customizable without requiring help from other binaries or scripts.