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
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Translate Content with the Google Translate API and JavaScript

    Note:  For this tutorial, I'm using version1 of the Google Translate API.  A newer REST-based version is available. In an ideal world, all websites would have a feature that allowed the user to translate a website into their native language (or even more ideally, translation would be...

  • By
    Flexbox Equal Height Columns

    Flexbox was supposed to be the pot of gold at the long, long rainbow of insufficient CSS layout techniques.  And the only disappointment I've experienced with flexbox is that browser vendors took so long to implement it.  I can't also claim to have pushed flexbox's limits, but...

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!