UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm not looking to exclude certain types of files, i'm only wanting to remove files that match a pattern "log_*[0-9]" in all sub-directories of where i'm at, except for a certain directory.

Say I am at
/tmp/

and inside tmp I have dirA dirB dirC dirD
I want to remove all files that match "log_*[0-9]" in all sub-directories(dirA dirB....) except for everything in dirC. How would I do that.

find also accepts specific defined directories provided into it...

Code:

find /tmp/dirA /tmp/dirB /tmp/dirD -type f -name 'log_*.[0-9]' ...

Other filtering tools are used only when find does not provide such facilites. Check find man pages for its supported options.

I could do that way, but there are like 20 directories I'm cleaning up, so I don't really want to have to pass find 20 different directories. I looked through the man page and found the -prune option, but I couldn't get that option to work.

I do not have a Solaris server to test, so I will suggest using the man page and looking to see if the Solaris find command has support for -regextype posix-egrep which would allow you to create a regular expression to only find the files you want and exclude the /test/tmp/ directory.

I'm not on Solaris, I'm on SuSE Linux - just piggy backed this since I figured it'd be close.

The man page for find specifies that you can not use -delete and -prune in the same command. So I would suggest using a combination of 'rm', 'find' and 'grep'

Code:

# you can test first by just running the find command then add the rm wrapper
rm $(find . -name "log_*.[0-9]" | grep -v "\/dir3\/")