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I require the script to cd to a directory, then delete all but a few files in sub-directories—but leave the folders alone. Would it help to use switch/cases for each file I need to preserve?
Ideally, I think it should keep searching for further sub-dirs, instead of me having nested loops which only search down two levels.
Another problem is that it skips folders with spaces (though this isn’t an issue with the volumes that the script will run, for now).
Here’s my code:
for i in /Users/YourName/Desktop/Test/* ; do
if [ -d "$i" ]; then
cd $i
for j in "$i"/* ; do
if [ -d "$j" ]; then
cd $j
for k in $(ls *); do
if [ ! $k == "watch.log" ]; then
echo $k
rm -rf $k
fi
done
fi
done
fi
done
259
The syntax to loop through each file individually in a loop is: create a variable (f for file, for example). Then define the data set you want the variable to cycle through. In this case, cycle through all files in the current directory using the * wildcard character (the * wildcard matches everything).
We use a standard wildcard glob pattern '*' which matches all files. By adding a '/' afterward, we'll match only directories. Then, we assign each directory to the value of a variable dir. In our simple example, we then execute the echo command between do and done to simply output the value of the variable dir.
This can be easily achieved by mixing find , xargs , sed (or other file modification command). This will filter all files with file extension . properties . The xargs command will feed the file path generated by find command into the sed command.
You should use find :
for i in $(find . -type d)
do
do_stuff "$i"
done
If you really have a lot of directories, you can pipe the output of find into a while read loop, but it makes coding harder as the loop is in another process.
About spaces, be sure to quote the variable containing the directory name. That should allow you to handle directories with spaces in their names fine.
127
How about this?
$ find /Users/YourName/Desktop/Test -type f -maxdepth 2 -not -name watch.log -delete
-type: look for files only-maxdepth: go down two levels at most-not -name (combo): exclude watch.log from the search-delete: deletes filesTry out the above command without the -delete flag first. That will print out a list of files that would have been deleted.
Once you’re happy with the list, add -delete back to the command.
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