Shell Programming and Scripting

RudiC is right. Clobbering directories wholesale like this can cause an awful mess. As an example: Are you sure you do not have symbolic links maybe from TEST2 to TEST1 or from TEST1 to TEST2? This would mean you do not have duplicates the way you think.

Code:

find TEST1 TEST2 -type l

would be a good thing to try before doing anything else.

As a further example of what jim mcnamara and RudiC are talking about, consider the following directories in your two file hierarchies:

Code:

/TEST1
/TEST1/dir1
/TEST1/dir1/dir1
/TEST1/dir3
/TEST1/dir3/dir3
/TEST1/subdir

/TEST2/dir1
/TEST2/dir1/dir1
/TEST2/dir2
/TEST2/dir2/dir2
/TEST2/dir2/dir2/subdir

your script will print:

Code:

2: dir2
2: dir3
2: subdir

(although the order of these lines in the output is not specified). I assume that you are then going to attempt to run the commands:

Code:

rm -rf /TEST1/dir2
rm -rf /TEST1/dir3
rm -rf /TEST1/subdir

Assuming that you have appropriate permissions to remove all of the files under /TEST1:This makes perfect sense to me if, and only if, there are no directories in any of the directories located in the directories /TEST1 and /TEST2 (unlike the file hierarchies in my example above). Is this really what you want to do?