UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

howdy all --

I recently trashed my old PC and bought a MacBook. Moving all my files over, I find I've got a zillion instances of stupid Windows files like Thumbs.db and desktop.ini all over the place. I'm looking for a way to delete them all at once (deleting each manually would take forever), and I'm hoping there's an easy way to do it using the Unix terminal built into OSX...

Basically, I'm looking for the "drill down through the file system, find every instance of X, and delete it" command...

...any suggestions are appreciated.

Try this,

Code:

find / \( -name 'Thumbs.db' -o -name  'desktop.ini' \) -okay rm {} \;

Above command asks for confirmation before proceeding with rm.

To remove without any confirmation, use

Code:

find / \( -name 'Thumbs.db' -o -name  'desktop.ini' \) -exec /bin/rm {} \;

Thanks.
Nagarajan G

Using xargs will be faster:

find / -name Thumbs.db -o -name desktop.ini | xargs rm -f