I issue the following command to find the .svn directories:
find . -name ".svn"
That gives me the following results:
./toto/.svn
./toto/titi/.svn
./toto/tata/.svn
How could I process all these lines with rm -fr in order to delete the directories and their content?
Find can execute arguments with the -exec option for each match it finds. It is a recommended mechanism because you can handle paths with spaces/newlines and other characters in them correctly. You will have to delete the contents of the directory before you can remove the directory itself, so use -r with the rm command to achieve this.
For your example you can issue:
find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -r "{}" \;
You can also tell find to just find directories named .svn by adding a -type d check:
find . -name ".svn" -type d -exec rm -r "{}" \;
Warning Use rm -r with caution it deletes the folder and all its contents.
If you want to delete just empty directories as well as directories that contain only empty directories, find can do that itself with -delete and -empty:
find . -name ".svn" -type d -empty -delete
-type after -name in find commands, since calls to stat to get the type are expensive. I just tried it myself on a fairly large bunch of files, and it seems to be true: running find . -name 'foo' -type d took 19 secs, while find . -type d -name 'foo' took 32 secs. So about 50% longer time to run -type first.
– SpinUp __ A Davis
Mar 16 '15 at 16:37
find wants to see in that folder for other matches, while it's removing the folder at the same time. ~I don't know yet how to fix this.~ Dirty fix: find . -name "folder-to-delete" -print0 | xargs -r0 -- rm -r
– Charlie
Jul 20 '16 at 12:02
-depth argument fixes this: find . -depth -name ".svn" -type d -exec rm -r "{}" \;
– gimboland
Jul 27 '16 at 07:57
-delete when removing only empty directories.
– Mikkel
Jul 27 '16 at 21:34
find finds both a directory and a subdirectory, it deletes the parent directory first, so then rm throws an error trying to delete the child. I can add -f to rm to fix this. But is there a smarter way? (e.g. so I don't accidentally delete files that rm usually rejects based on permissions)
– falsePockets
Jul 23 '21 at 00:50
Here is a portable still faster than the accepted answer way.
Using a + instead of a semicolon as find command terminator is optimizing the CPU usage. That can be significant if you have a lot of .svn sub-directories:
find . -name .svn -type d -exec rm -rf {} +
Note also that you never1 need to quote the curly braces here.
1 Unless you use the fish shell (this might have been fixed since I wrote this reply).
+ does reduce CPU usage, Using ; does not lead to a command too long error.
– jlliagre
Mar 22 '17 at 12:26
find won't actually escape the path replaced for {} because there is no need to do it. It simply passes the file name(s) as is to the executed command, here rm.
– jlliagre
Mar 22 '17 at 12:43
+ is lighter than ; which is precisely my point in this reply. Piping find output to something else is off topic, especially because + was design to avoid doing it. Moreover, suggesting to use -delete while my answer was aimed to provide a portable solution was ruining it, not to mention it wouldn't have worked in the OP case.
– jlliagre
Mar 22 '17 at 14:25
fish might have changed its behavior in the recent years. Updating my reply.
– jlliagre
Feb 14 '20 at 12:36
Assume you are using gnu find, you can use the -delete option:
find . -name test -delete
which is easier to remember.
-delete can be used with directories but will only delete empty directories. You must therefore make sure your expression selects all the files inside the directory in addition to the directory itself (note that -delete implies -depth). This will work:
find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex '.*/test(/.*)?' -delete
– Robin A. Meade
Jun 16 '22 at 02:10
A faster way to do this is:
find . -name ".svn" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' '+'
In case you have ".svn" inside another ".svn".
On my computer when I use:
find . \( -name dirname -type d \) -exec rm -r '{}' ';'
The directories are deleted but I get the error:
find: ‘./dirname’: No such file or directory
for each directory.
My directories aren't empty, so the -delete option won't work for me. I found the reason for this behavior here:
- find takes (not necessarily) the first entry in the ./ directory. this would be e.g. dir.1/
- it compares it to the pattern 'dir.?'. does it match? yes.
- find executes "rm -r dir.1".
- find tries to enter dir.1/ to find the pattern within the directory. it doesn't know anything about the exec command.
- it doesn't find dir.1/ anymore. returns ENOENT (look at the strace output)
I used this instead to work around:
rm -r `find . -name dirname -type d`
Keep in mind that find will still try to recurse into directories named dirname, which isn't really necessary and will take some additional time. Depending on your directory structure, you might be able to work around this with the --depth find option. In addition, if you have a directory structure like dirname/foo/dirname you will get "No such file or directory" errors from rm. To suppress the errors you can redirect stderr to /dev/null or use the -f (force) flag with rm.
find . -name "to-delete" -print0 | xargs -r0 -- rm -r is a failproof version which doesn't crash on spaces
– Charlie
Jul 20 '16 at 12:08
I've found that the -delete action does work nicely with the -path test. For instance, the following ought to work on the original posters problem:
find . -path '*/.svn*' -delete
Note that in addition to deleting '.svn' directories (and their contents), this will also delete any files or directories whose names start with '.svn'. For example, if you used -path '*/.git*' it would also delete '.gitignore' and '.gitattribute' in addition to '.git/'. To avoid that, and just delete directories with that exact name use:
find . -path '*/.svn/*' -or -name '.svn' -delete
Note the slash after .svn. This will first find, and delete, all the files under '.svn', then delete the .svn directory itself.
-delete implies -depth, and it sure deletes non-empty directories on my system.
– Magnus
Dec 20 '17 at 13:56
-delete won’t delete non-empty directories (GNU find 4.6.0). Seems to be the case for many people. What is your implementation of find?
– Maëlan
Dec 10 '21 at 01:13
Bash specific solution:
shopt -s globstar
rm -r **/.svn
shopt -u globstar #optional. this will disable globstar expansion
bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
– Drav Sloan
Sep 09 '13 at 10:06
find . -name .svn -prune -execdir rm -rf {} +
-execdir, not -execFrom man find:
There are unavoidable security problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should use the -execdir option instead.
In most case, -execdir is a drop-in replacement for -exec.
+, not ;From man find:
As with the -exec action, the `+' form of -execdir will build a command line to process more than one matched file, but any given invocation of command will only list files that exist in the same subdirectory.
When looking for an exact name match, + and ; will do the same, as you cannot have two files with the same name in the same directory, but + will provide increased performance when several files/directories match your find expression within the same directory.
Also, ; needs escaping from your shell, + does not.
-pruneFrom man find:
-prune: True; if the file is a directory, do not descend into it.
This avoid searching a directory that we want to delete. Obviously, it needs to be put after the name test. See:
$ mkdir -p test/foo/bar
$ find test -name foo -execdir rm -rf {} +
find: ‘test/foo/bar’: No such file or directory
Versus:
$ mkdir -p test/foo/bar
$ find test -name foo -prune -execdir rm -rf {} +
# no error
-prune rather than -depth. There is no point in having find recurse under directories you are going to delete anyway.
– Maëlan
Dec 10 '21 at 01:17
-execdir (rather than -exec) cancels all the benefit of using + (rather than ;). From the man page again: “_As with the -exec action, the + form of -execdir will build a command line to process more than one matched file, but any given invocation of command will only list files that exist in the same subdirectory._” In our case, two occurrences can never lie in the same parent directory, since both occurrences have the same base name. Security is not a concern for a command line that you type yourself in a terminal once, with a known command being -executed.
– Maëlan
Dec 10 '21 at 01:34
Short and simplest solution is to use xargs here
find . -name ".svn" | xargs rm -rf
.svn directory includes whitespace. The other answers avoid this problem.
– Stephen Kitt
Aug 17 '21 at 13:27
-deleteoption. – Marco Sep 09 '13 at 08:49-exec rm -r "{}" \;to the end of the find - be careful when usingrm -r! :) – Drav Sloan Sep 09 '13 at 08:52-name ".svn"it matches only the.svndirectory itself and not the files located in the.svndirectory. – Marco Sep 09 '13 at 09:22rm -r \find . -name ".svn"`` also works – Arnaud Sep 09 '13 at 09:31-execwith quoted"{}"). – Drav Sloan Sep 09 '13 at 09:55rm -r– Drav Sloan Sep 09 '13 at 09:56rm -rwithrmdir(rmdir will delete empty directories, but fail with errors on directories containing files). – Drav Sloan Sep 09 '13 at 10:08{}in quotes has no effect. – G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica' Oct 27 '20 at 23:43