01-28-2009
the -prune option prevents find from walking a subdirectory underneath it's current location. Without prune, you might print a listing as follows:
file1
file2
dir1
dir1/file1
dir1/file2
file3
file4
With prune you would print a listing like this:
file1
file2
dir1
file3
file4
When the command is piped into xargs followed by another command like the 'rm' in your example xargs acts as like a loop for the input coming from the pipe and runs the command (rm -f ) for each line of input.
The directory wont be removed by rm -f but the error will be sent to /dev/null so the user wont see this. The effect is that the files will be removed but not the directories, nor the files in the directories.
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