Delete all folders containing files which match pattern

Question

I'm trying to delete all subdirectories of my current working directory which contain a rar file.

My first attempt: find -name *.rar -exec rm -r {}/.. ';' failed because that is not a valid directory. I tried using dirname {} for a more sensible command, but decided to just ask for help after almost deleting stuff I didn't mean to.

I'm using Cygwin on Windows 7, in case that's relevant.

Answer 1

You could do it with a pair of statements.

First, get a list of directories to remove using

find -name *.rar -exec dirname {} ';' > toremove

Next, cat toremove to make sure it has the folders you want. Then, pass it to rm -rf using

sed 's/^/"/g' toremove | sed 's/$/"/g' | xargs rm -r

Last, rm toremove.

Answer 2

With zsh:

rm -rf **/*.rar(:h)

The suffix :h applies the history expansion modifier h (“head”) which removes the basename of each match, keeping only the directory part.

Make sure to check that these are really the directories you want to delete! For example, move them to a temporary directory first:

mkdir DELETE
mv **/*.rar(:h) DELETE/
# check that you really want to delete everything in DELETE
rm -r DELETE

Answer 3

You can use bash -c to perform more advanced operations in and -exec for find. The problem with using a temp file and cat in combination with xargs is that it will break if a file contains a space, newline, or tab. The following should work:

find . -type f -name '*.rar' -exec bash -c 'rm -rf "${@%/*}"' -- {} +

Using + for find with "$@" will execute rm one time like with xargs.

Answer 4

You could try something like this:

for dir in */; do             # iterate all subdirectories
    touch $dir"dummy.rar"     # create a "rar"-file...
    for file in $dir*.rar; do # ...so this won't break on zero such
        rm $file              # remove the dummy, and all archives
    done
done