{"id":857,"date":"2015-08-18T19:42:31","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T01:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/islascruz.org\/blog\/?p=857"},"modified":"2016-11-29T17:15:40","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T23:15:40","slug":"find-and-remove-files-with-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/islascruz.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/18\/find-and-remove-files-with-find\/","title":{"rendered":"Find (and remove files) with find"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"terminal\"<\/a><\/p>\n

find<\/strong>\u00a0is a great tool to find things, but not only to find them, but to work on them. I have a small collection of music, which I presume at some point will be removed from my computer hard drive (maybe if I can get a new one it won’t be there at all) because I mostly listen to music from internet and I have a copy of the music in a external hard drive.<\/p>\n

Today I imported the folder where the music is to iTunes again, and it created playlists that I don’t remember to have them before. That is because there were several m3u files there (winamp playlists), there are around 5k files in that directory tree and I don’t want to spend my time looking for m3u files, so, let the computer do the job.<\/p>\n

With find is easy to find files, not by their name but by their type the f<\/em> is for file.<\/p>\n

\nfind . -type f\n<\/pre>\n
Ok, but that will include all the “mp3” which are files, so if I make use of -iname<\/em> to find by name, \u00a0how can I do the opposite?, well, like in most programming languages, you can negate by using the exclamation symbol !.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nfind . -type f ! -iname "*mp3"\n<\/pre>\n
And add some more extensions.<\/p>\n
\nfind . -type f ! -iname "*mp3" ! -iname "*ogg" ! -iname "*m4a" ! -iname "*wma"\n<\/pre>\n
That will give me all files that are not mp3, ogg, m4a or wma. Then just use the -delete<\/em> parameter to as find to delete them.<\/p>\n
\nfind . -type f ! -iname "*mp3" ! -iname "*ogg" ! -iname "*m4a" ! -iname "*wma" -delete\n<\/pre>\n
And… they are gone.<\/p>\n
How would you do it?. Share it in the comments.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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find\u00a0is a great tool to find things, but not only to find them, but to work on them. I have a small collection of music, which I presume at some point will be removed from my computer hard drive (maybe if I can get a new one it won’t be there at all) because I […]<\/p>\n
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