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How do I recursively remove files that are less than 1MB in size from a directory?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Feb 9 at 7:15

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5 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

This can be done with find:

find -type f -size -1M -exec rm {} +

Note that this will recursively descend into subdirectories, and will unconditionally delete all files smaller than 1 megabyte. Be careful.

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you're missing the path argument to find – Useless Feb 8 at 12:25
@Useless: That's GNU find. :) – Sven Marnach Feb 8 at 12:29
I never knew it let you omit that! – Useless Feb 8 at 12:31
@Useless: It does, but other versions of find don't, so if you want portability, you should include a directory argument. – Sven Marnach Feb 8 at 12:35
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@DanielAndersson: find restricts the number of arguments to the called process to fit into the system's limits, in contrast to rm *, which is guranteed to be a single process invocation. find will invoke multiple instance of rm if necessary. And I'm pretty sure that special characters are treated correctly, including newline characters. I prefer -exec rm over -delete for flexibility reasons -- as an example, the latter offers no way to delete write-protected files. – Sven Marnach Feb 13 at 11:57
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up vote 3 down vote

This should do the job:

$ find <directory> -type f -size -1M -delete
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up vote 2 down vote

Just for variety and a possible (probably marginal) performance gain:

find <directory> -type f -size -1M -print0  | xargs -0 rm
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How is this supposed to be faster? It starts an additional xargs process. – Sven Marnach Feb 8 at 12:33
Now you can have two CPUs contending for the same block device! More sensibly, the stat/readdir operations aren't synchronously blocked by the unlink operation. Whether this is likely to be better obviously depends on the subtree size, number of files, device etc. – Useless Feb 8 at 12:36
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up vote 0 down vote

Try

find . -size -1M -exec rm {} \;

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up vote -1 down vote

You can checkout this link http://ayaz.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/bash-quickly-deleting-empty-files-in-a-directory/ , it has exactly what you want.

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Answers on SO should be self-contained -- don't post a mere link. (Moreover, the code in the linked post deletes empty files rather than files smaller than 1M.) – Sven Marnach Feb 8 at 12:32
@SvenMarnach can't we use $file_size < 1M in the given code example link. – Ravia Feb 8 at 12:36
No, we can't, since the shell won't understand 1M. – Sven Marnach Feb 8 at 12:43
By 1M I meant 1048576 converting 1MB to byte – Ravia Feb 8 at 13:01
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Well, if you test if this really works and copy the code to your answer, this might become an SO answer. – Sven Marnach Feb 8 at 13:06
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