UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear All,

I want to write the Unix command that searches through all subdirectories, finds the files named ''core'' and deletes them.

I will very much appreciate your help.

David

What about

find /somedir -type f -name 'core' -exec rm {} \;

But what happens when your chief exec has a legitimate file called "core" in his or her home directory that contains their core budget proposals for the year?

Far safer to do something like....

Code:

find /some/path/here -name "core" -type f -exec file {} \; | 
	awk -F: '/core file/ {print $1}' | xargs -t rm

You might need to change the awk depending on your OS

If you keep seeing a core file dumped in the same place time after time (and you can't fix the application thats generating itself directly), just

Code:

>/path/to/core
chmod 400 /path/to/core

This will truncate the core file to 0 bytes, and then make it read only - now when the core dumps, it won't be able to overwrite this file and the core file will remain at 0 bytes. Sloppy but it works...

Cheers
ZB

That's hilarious ...... though I guess this will not occur because they only use Windows, I think, and this doesn't work on Windows.

That's all for the joke.

I will not use this command myself, as I have disabled all core dumps on all machines I work on. I seldom use dangerous automatic commands like this but if I am to use one I will always confirm the list of files to be deleted with a

find /somedir -type f -name 'core'

first and verify the files listed before I will actually run that command, for safety sake.

For one thing, the chief exec had better not make an error that causes a coredump.