Linux – Remove all files by filename (Linux one-liner)

cakephplinuxscripting

CakePHP has a convention of putting files called "empty" in empty directories. I'm sure they have a reason, but it really bugs me. (Yeah, OCD, I know…)

I want a one-line linux shell command that will delete every file with the name "empty" in every descendent directory. (I suppose it would be useful to be able to specify wildcards for more general use too.)

Any ideas?

Best Answer

Simplest is:

find . -name empty -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

"." starts at current directory, replace with a directory path if you want to execute it in another location.

"-type f" just makes sure it's a file.

Related Solutions

Linux – Filename Length Limits Explained

See the Wikipedia page about file systems comparison, especially in column Maximum filename length.

Here are some filename length limits in popular file systems:

BTRFS   255 bytes
exFAT   255 UTF-16 characters
ext2    255 bytes
ext3    255 bytes
ext3cow 255 bytes
ext4    255 bytes
FAT32   8.3 (255 UCS-2 code units with VFAT LFNs)
NTFS    255 characters
XFS     255 bytes

Bash one-liner loop over directories throws errors

You need to remove the backtics around your tar command. You also might want to pipe the ls through xargs to make sure bash picks up all the directories correctly:

for f in `ls -d */ | xargs`; do tar -cvzf ${f%/}.tar.gz $f; done

The backticks are capturing the ouput of tar and attempting to execute that as a command in each iteration of the loop. The first thing tar prints when you use a -v option is the permissions on each file (e.g. the drwxrwxr-x). In this case, you want bash to execute the tar command, not capture the output.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Filename Length Limits Explained

Bash one-liner loop over directories throws errors

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