UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Say I have a directory call test, and several directories nested in it, and several directories nested in them. And I want to remove all directories within "test" and its subdirectories that have the name "cvs", how can I do this?

I tried rm -r cvs, but that only removed the top level direcotry name cvs.

Thanks for any help

I'd say something like

find /path/to/test -name "cvs" -type d | xargs rm -r

As with all rm -r usage - beware! I always create a test directory structure first whilst evaluating the command and its side-effects!

Cheers
ZB

Hi,
Thanks very much, could you explain what "-type d | xargs" means.
I assume -type d means directory

No problem.

You are correct - "-type d" does indeed mean directories. Specifically it tells find to only match files of type "directory". This can also be f for regular files, l for symlinks, etc - "man find" will detail the plethora of options available for find - an extrememly powerful command.

The | xargs bit is used to pipe the results from find (i.e. the list of directories) to the rm -r command, so that the command can then be executed. We could also have formed the find command thusly:
find /path/to/test -name "cvs" -type d -exec rm -r {} \;
and it would have done pretty much the same thing.
xargs is useful when the number of results returned by find exceeds the maximum number of arguments allowed by the command we're piping to. Using find with "exec" would have sufficed here, but xargs is habit (and I believe, good practice) for me.

man find, man xargs, man <my_shell_here> will teach you more about the find and xargs commands - and pipes and redirection.

Cheers
ZB

Thank you, I appreciate your help