How to use Terminal to delete all .svn folders recursively?

Question

what command can I type into Terminal so that I can:

?

Rich Homolka · Answer 1 · 2012-02-09 16:53:32Z

cd to/dir/where/you/want/to/start
find . -type d -name '.svn' -print -exec rm -rf {} \;

Use find, which does recursion
in the current directory .
filetype is directory
filename is .svn
print what matched up to this point (the .svn dirs)
exec the command rm -rf (thing found from find). the {} is a placeholder for the entity found
the ; tells find that the command for exec is done. Since the shell also has an idea of what ; is, you need to escape it with \ so that the shell ignores it, and just passes to find

Good solution. While find has -delete it won't delete non-empty directories. This approach is cleaner than e.g. starting to match parts of the whole path of files.
I'd recommend running it without the -exec rm -rf {} \; the first time to make sure it's only finding what you want it to. I've never had an issue where I've accidentally deleting the wrong thing with it, because I always check first.
@Rob good point, i usually do -exec echo rm -rf {} \; then remove the echo.

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