remove *.ini in all Dirs with one command

Dankles · 11-01-2005, 08:42 PM

I recently moved all 60GBs of my music from my Win box to my slackware file server.
Windoze indexing service kindly makes desktop.ini and thumbs.db automagicly in all of the directories.
Is there any way to remove all of these files with one command?
I'm know this isn't really a Slackware specific question, but you guys always give the best of answers.
something with 'find' combined with 'rm' maybe?

darkarcon2015 · 11-01-2005, 08:56 PM

You can find everything in a directory and all the directories contained in it with:

Code:

find * | grep "search_phrase"

And you can remove everything with *.ini with:

Code:

rm -rf *.ini

But, I think the "-r" option of `rm` meaning recursive, will search through all directories starting with the one you are currently in.

Dankles · 11-01-2005, 09:40 PM

I tried the 'rm -r' option before with no success. I thought that the recursive thing would work because when i remove directory trees i use 'rm -dr'.

rkelsen · 11-01-2005, 10:53 PM

How about a 'for' loop?

Code:

# find /musicdirectory | grep "desktop.ini" > temporary_file

# for i in `cat temporary_file`; do rm $i; done

Check the contents of 'temporary_file' to see what would be deleted before doing do.

Please note the use of `backticks`. On my keyboard, they're on the same key as ~.

You could probably do it all in one step, but I'd be more comfortable seeing what would be deleted first.

gbonvehi · 11-02-2005, 12:09 AM

Or using just find:

Code:

find /directory -name '*.ini' -exec rm '{}' \;

LiNuCe · 11-02-2005, 04:52 PM

Quote:

gbonvehi: Or using just find:

Code:

find /directory -name '*.ini' -exec rm '{}' \;

Faster version :

Code:

find /directory -name \*.ini | xargs rm -f

--
LiNuCe

raska · 11-02-2005, 05:28 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by LiNuCe
Faster version :

Code:

find /directory -name \*.ini | xargs rm -f

I'm not sure if that works

LiNuCe · 11-02-2005, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by raska
I'm not sure if that works

It does work as long as *.ini files do not have space/special characters in their full pathnames, in which case the following, modified the gbonvehi's solution is the right one (at least with the BASH shell):

Code:

find /directory -name \*.ini -exec rm -f \\'{}\\' \;

--
LiNuCe

jschiwal · 11-02-2005, 06:00 PM

The find command has an option -print0 that uses a null character between filenames.
The xargs command has a corresponding -0 or --null option that uses this kind of input. This should help if the file or pathnames contain whitespace characters.

Also consider using one of the options to limit the number of files handled at a time. This is needed if you have a very large number of files output by the find command.

Dankles · 11-03-2005, 08:36 AM

I havent had a change to test any of these yet, I've been busy with work, but i'll let all of you guys know how it worked.
thanks everyone

Dankles · 11-03-2005, 08:56 PM

Hey all, I finally had a chance to test all of these out.

gbonvehi:
the
# find /directory -name '*.ini' -exec rm '{}' \;
command worked well

rkelsen:
I liked the For loop idea aswell, but I had to modify it to get it to work with spaces in my file names.

thanks everyone