Find files matching template and remove

Question

I have a large amount of folders and files. I need to parse it and find only those with the extension xmp to finally remove them.

How can I achieve this and keep track of the name of the removed files?

To find: I know I can use find /path -name "*.xmp" But how can I run two commands on the output? keep file path and name in removelist.txt and remove it.

Answer 1

With GNU find's -fprint and -delete actions:

find . -name "*.xmp" -fprint "removelist.txt" -delete

• -fprint file - print the full file name into file file. If file does not exist when find is run, it is created; if it does exist, it is truncated.
• -delete - delete files

Answer 2

To log the files that were successfully removed, you could do:

find . -name '*.xmp' -exec rm -f {} \; -print > removed.txt

The -print action will only be run if the -exec action was successful, that is if rm succeeded.

With some find implementations, you can replace the -exec rm -f {} \; with -delete to avoid running one command for each file and avoid some race conditions (initially a FreeBSD extension, but now supported by GNU find and a few others).

Answer 3

One way is to execute a compound shell command with -exec:

find /path -name '*.xmp' -exec sh -c 'echo "$1" >> removelist.txt && rm -f "$1"' sh {} \;

Inside a sub-shell both echo (appended to removelist.txt) and rm will be run against each found file.

Note: The last sh is because we are using -c. With that flag the first argument that follows is param 0 or $0 which is supposed to be the name of the shell.

Gotta admit, @RomanPerekhrest has a nicer answer for this particular case but with the technique here you can do all sorts of things for which there might not be a dedicated find flag. :)