find and delte commands
 

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 :newbie:

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