How do I delete a folder that contains a file or folder with a specific name?
E.g. I want to delete all folders that contain the file "things.txt":
/dirA/
/dirB/things.txt
/dirC/
/dirD/things.txt
/dirE/things.txt
/dirF/
It would then delete dirB, dirD, and dirE -- not just the files inside.
A solution without piping somewhere else would be to pass the directory name to a subshell in find's exec function.
This will not be as efficient, and of course it'll try to remove directories that don't exist if they've already been deleted.
find . -depth -type f -name 'things.txt' -exec sh -c 'rm -rf "$(dirname $0)"' {} \;
If you want to use xargs, you could do it very simply like so. Note that dirname only takes one argument, so you have to specify -n 1 to have xargs only pass one:
find . -depth -type f -name 'things.txt' | xargs -n 1 dirname | uniq | xargs rm -rf
This will not be safe if your directory name contains a newline, so be aware of that.
xargs -n 1 splits directory names with spaces in them, making it unusable. Is there a way to fix that?
Aug 28, 2014 at 20:30
-print0 to the find and -0 to the xargs fixed the spaces issue, and since I decided I wanted to move everything to the trash and not delete it immediately, I ended up changing the xargs to xargs -0 -n 1 -I {} sh -c 'filename=$(dirname "{}"); mv "$filename" "./Trash";' Thanks a bunch!
Sep 20, 2014 at 3:32
This has been tested on Linux as these commands below are also executable on Unix system.
find -type f -name 'things.txt' | xargs dirname | xargs rm -r
Explanation:
find -type f -name 'things.txt' --> search for file named 'things.txt' (file only, not directory)
| --> piping the result to next command
xargs dirname | --> grabbing the directory name the file is located in then pipe the result to next command
xargs rm -r --> proceed to remove all of these directories that has the file by name of 'things.txt'
Voila!
find to xargs, please use find ... -print0 and xargs -0.
rm: cannont remove './DirD\n./DirB\n./DirE\n': No such file or directory. with -0, it is preventing bash from looping all files with sets of functions combined?
dirname: extra operand ... things.txt'`.
xargs to only pass one argument to dirname (see my answer). There could be different default behavior depending on your utility versions. OS X is a bit different than Linux in this regard.