Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Recursively Delete Files from Command Line

By  on  

I'm one of those people who can't stand a messy laptop;  I don't keep around files I don't need and I refuse to install apps unless I absolutely need them.  Unfortunately Mac OS X and Windows generate files whenever they like, like .DS_Store and Thumbs.db.  Sure they serve their purpose but that doesn't mean the clutter doesn't annoy me.

If you want to recursively find delete files you don't want, there's a simple way to do that:

find . -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete

You can use * as a wildcard too:

find . -name '*.zip' -type f -delete

Of course my cleanup only lasts a short time, but hey -- you can use this command for more intelligent purposes!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Tolga

    Interestingly. I only knew about -exec and xargs.

  2. Hristo
    rm find . -name '.DS_Store'
  3. Loz

    I use Asepsis for .DS_Store files: http://asepsis.binaryage.com/

  4. RoseHosting

    Just to mention that the order of the -delete flag is very important. Putting -delete flag first will make find try to delete everything below the specified starting point.

  5. Jason

    If you’re on Windows, the following will work the same:

    del /s .DS_Store
del /s Thumbs.db
  6. Eric

    Using -iname instead of -name will ignore case.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!