How to loop through a directory recursively to delete files with certain extensions

Question

I need to loop through a directory recursively and remove all files with extension  pdf and  doc  I m managing to loop through a directory recursively but not managing to filter the files with the above mentioned file extensions   My code so far    bin sh  SEARCH FOLDER   tmp     for f in  SEARCH FOLDER do     if   -d   f        then         for ff in  f           do                   echo  Processing  ff          done     else         echo  Processing file  f      fi done   I need help to complete the code  since I m not getting anywhere

User · Answer

If you want to do something recursively  I suggest you use recursion  yes  you can do it using stacks and so on  but hey    recursiverm       for d in    do     if   -d   d     then        cd --   d   amp  amp  recursiverm      fi     rm -f   pdf     rm -f   doc   done     cd  tmp  recursiverm    That said  find is probably a better choice as has already been suggested

User · Answer

Without find   for f in  tmp   tmp        do       done     tmp   are files in dir and  tmp      are files in subfolders  It is possible that you have to enable globstar option  shopt -s globstar   So for the question  the code should look like this   shopt -s globstar for f in  tmp   pdf  tmp   doc tmp      pdf tmp      doc   do   rm   f  done   Note that this requires bash  4 0  or zsh without shopt -s globstar  or ksh with set -o globstar instead of shopt -s globstar   Furthermore  in bash  lt 4 3  this traverses symbolic links to directories as well as directories  which is usually not desirable

User · Answer

This doesn t answer your question directly  but you can solve your problem with a one-liner   find  tmp    -name    pdf  -o -name    doc     -type f -exec rm        Some versions of find  GNU  BSD  have a -delete action which you can use instead of calling rm   find  tmp    -name    pdf  -o -name    doc     -type f -delete

User · Answer

There is no reason to pipe the output of find into another utility  find has a -delete flag built into it   find  tmp -name    pdf  -or -name    doc  -delete

User · Answer

The following function would recursively iterate through all the directories in the  home ubuntu directory  whole directory structure under ubuntu   and apply the necessary checks in else block   function check           for file in  1                 do         if   -d   file            then                 check  file                                   else                  check for the file                if     head -c 4   file       PDF     then                          rm -r  file                fi         fi         done        domain  home ubuntu check  domain

User · Answer

This is the simplest way I know to do this  rm        doc   pdf      makes this work recursively      doc   pdf  looks for a file ending in pdf OR doc  Easy to safely test by replacing rm with ls

User · Answer

Just do  find   -name    pdf  xargs rm

User · Answer

Here is an example using shell  bash       bin bash    loop  amp  print a folder recusively  print folder recurse         for i in   1    do         if   -d   i    then             echo  dir   i              print folder recurse   i          elif   -f   i     then             echo  file   i          fi     done       try get path from param path    if   -d   1     then     path  1  else     path   tmp  fi  echo  base path   path  print folder recurse  path

User · Answer

For bash  since version 4 0    shopt -s globstar nullglob dotglob echo       ext    That s all  The trailing extension   ext  there to select files  or dirs  with that extension   Option globstar activates the     search recursivelly   Option nullglob removes an   when it matches no file dir  Option dotglob includes files that start wit a dot  hidden files    Beware that before bash 4 3      also traverses symbolic links to directories which is not desirable

User · Answer

find is just made for that   find  tmp -name    pdf  -or -name    doc    xargs rm

User · Answer

The other answers provided will not include files or directories that start with a   the following worked for me     bin sh getAll       local fl1   1       local fl2   1             local fl3   1          for inpath in   1      1           1        do     if     inpath       fl1  -a   inpath       fl2  -a   inpath       fl3     then        stat --printf   F 0 n 0 n  --   inpath         if   -d   inpath     then         getAll   inpath         elif   -f  inpath    then       fi      fi    done

User · Answer

The following will loop through the given directory recursively and list all the contents    for d in  home ubuntu     do      echo  listing contents of dir   d        ls -l  d    done

User · Answer

If you can change the shell used to run the command  you can use ZSH to do the job      usr bin zsh  for file in  tmp      do     echo  file done   This will recursively loop through all files folders

User · Answer

This method handles spaces well   files    find -L   dir  -type f   echo  Count    echo -n   files    wc -l   echo   files    while read file  do   echo   file  done   Edit  fixes off-by-one  function count         files    find -L   1  -type f        if      files            then         echo  No files           return 0      fi     file count   echo   files    wc -l      echo  Count   file count      echo   files    while read file  do         echo   file      done

User · Answer

As a followup to mouviciel s answer  you could also do this as a for loop  instead of using xargs  I often find xargs cumbersome  especially if I need to do something more complicated in each iteration   for f in   find  tmp -name    pdf  -or -name    doc    do rm  f  done   As a number of people have commented  this will fail if there are spaces in filenames  You can work around this by temporarily setting the IFS  internal field seperator  to the newline character  This also fails if there are wildcard characters      in the file names  You can work around that by temporarily disabling wildcard expansion  globbing    IFS    n   set -f for f in   find  tmp -name    pdf  -or -name    doc    do rm   f   done unset IFS  set  f   If you have newlines in your filenames  then that won t work either  You re better off with an xargs based solution   find  tmp    -name    pdf  -or -name    doc     -print0   xargs -0 rm    The escaped brackets are required here to have the -print0 apply to both or clauses    GNU and  BSD find also has a -delete action  which would look like this   find  tmp    -name    pdf  -or -name    doc     -delete

[bash] How to loop through a directory recursively to delete files with certain extensions

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