How to remove folders with a certain name

Question

In Linux  how do I remove folders with a certain name which are nested deep in a folder hierarchy   The following paths are under a folder and I would like to remove all folders named a     1 2 3 a 1 2 3 b 10 20 30 a 10 20 30 b 100 200 300 a 100 200 300 b   What Linux command should I use from the parent folder

User · Answer

find    -name  FOLDERNAME    xargs rm -Rf   Should do the trick   WARNING  if you accidentally pump a   or   into xargs rm -Rf your entire computer will be deleted without an option to get it back  requiring an OS reinstall

User · Answer

Use find for name  a  and execute rm to remove those named according to your wishes  as follows   find   -name a -exec rm -rf         Test it first using ls to list   find   -name a -exec ls         To ensure this only removes directories and not plain files  use the  -type d  arg  as suggested in the comments    find   -name a -type d -exec rm -rf         The      is a substitution for each file  a  found - the exec command is executed against each by substitution

User · Answer

This also works - it will remove all the folders called  a  and their contents   rm -rf  find -type d -name a

User · Answer

I ended up here looking to delete my node modules folders before doing a backup of my work in progress using rsync  A key requirements is that the node modules folder can be nested  so you need the -prune option   First I ran this to visually verify the folders to be deleted   find -type d -name node modules -prune   Then I ran this to delete them all   find -type d -name node modules -prune -exec rm -rf         Thanks to pistache

User · Answer

If the target directory is empty  use find  filter with only directories  filter by name  execute rmdir  find   -type d -name a -exec rmdir        If you want to recursively delete its contents  replace -exec rmdir       with -delete or -prune -exec rm -rf        Other answers include details about these versions  credit them too

User · Answer

Combining multiple answers  here s a command that works on both Linux and MacOS  rm -rf   find   -type d -name   pycache

User · Answer

To delete all directories with the name foo  run   find -type d -name foo -a -prune -exec rm -rf         The other answers are missing an important thing  the -prune option   Without -prune  GNU find will delete the directory with the matching name and then try to recurse into it to find more directories that match   The -prune option tells it to not recurse into a directory that matched the conditions

User · Answer

Another one    -exec rm -rf        can be replaced by  -delete   find -type d -name   pycache   -delete        GNU find find   -type d -name   pycache   -delete      POSIX find  e g  Mac OS X

User · Answer

find path to the folders -maxdepth 1 -name  my    -type d -delete

User · Answer

I had more than 100 files like   log-12 log-123 log-34        above answers did not work for me   but the following command helped me   find   -name  log-   -exec rm  -rf         i gave -type as   so it deletes both files and folders which starts with log-  and rm -rf deletes folders recursively even it has files    if you want folders alone  find -type d -name  log-   -exec rm  -rf         files alone  find -type f -name  log-   -exec rm  -rf

User · Answer

This command works for me  It does its work recursively   find   -name  node modules  -type d -prune -exec rm -rf            - current folder   node modules  - folder name

[linux] How to remove folders with a certain name

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