Re: Best (most efficient method) recursive dir DEL

Hi Kyle,

You might find it worth looking at the following invocation of find:

find <top_dir> -name <name_to_del> -exec rm -rf {} \+ -prune

the '+' will support expansion of arguments, thus it works exactly like
xargs in building up a command line that is passed to rm. You may also need
to specify \"{}\" to handle whitespace in directory names, untested.


On 22 May 2014 00:10, Kyle <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I was wondering what is the best (as in most efficient method) for doing
> an automated, scheduled recursive search and DEL exercise. The scheduled
> part is just a cron job, no problem. But what's the most efficient method
> to loop a given structure and remove all (non-empty) directories below the
> top dir?
>
> The 3 examples I've come up with are;
>
> find <top_dir> -name <name_to_find_and_DEL> -exec rm -rf {} \;      -
> what's the '\' for and is it necessary?
>

You need to escape ';' from the shell, otherwise it will think it's the end
of the command and strip it from what is passed to 'find' which will in
turn exit with an exception in that it couldn't work out where the end of
the 'exec' command occurred.



>
> rm -rf `find <top_dir> -type d -name <name_to_find_and_DEL>`     - does it
> actually require the ' ` ' or are ' ' ' good enough?
>
> find <top_dir> -name '<name_to_find_and_DEL>' -type d -delete    - or
> won't this work for a non-empty dir?
>
> Or is there a more efficient manner which I can slot into a cron job?
>


As someone else already pointed out, it'll probably depend on

-- 
Darragh Bailey
"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool"
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