Unix - find and remove files

Since rm command does not support searching of files we need to use find and rm command in combination. While working with searching and removing files today, I thought, I will share with you some of these combinations to make your search easy.

find

Search files matching a certain pattern viz, '&'

find . -name "*&*"

Here we are looking in the current directory for all the files which have '&' in its name and in case you need to exclude few set of files with a particular pattern viz, '_'

find . -name "*&*" -and –not –name "_"

If the directory we are searching in also has subdirectories which you would like to exclude from the search, then use type switch,

find . –type f -name "*&*" -and –not –name "_"

find and rm

Now that we have found the list of files we would like to remove from the directory, we need to pass this list to the 'rm' (remove) command. Since rm command takes one file at a time, there are two ways we can do this.

find . -name "FILE_SEARCH_PATTERN"-exec rm -i {} \;

If you don't want the confirmation before removing each file, replace the rm switch –i with -f

Or

find . -name "FILE_SEARCH_PATTERN" | xargs rm

Where 'xargs' creates an argument list for a UNIX command using standard input and executes it. In UNIX shells, there is a restriction on the number of arguments allowed on a command line. 'xargs' helps here with bundling the arguments into smaller groups and execute rm command for each group separately.