I accidentally copied the folders in my Music directory to the parent michal directory. I want to delete these directories in one fell swoop.
Is there any way to make the following work? Or is there a better alternative?
/home/michal/Music $ find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -exec rm -r ../{} \;
Evidently the {} is not being substituted, because the above returns
rm: ../{}: No such file or directory
rm: ../{}: No such file or directory
rm: ../{}: No such file or directory
...
Your find command works fine for me with GNU find. If it doesn't work on your system, try:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec sh -c 'rm -r "../$1"' Rm {} \;
This approach uses {} as an independent argument, not modified by ../. We pass the value of {} to the shell and the shell applies the ../.
Notes:
The order of -maxdepth 1 and -type d was reversed as man find recommends that global options, like -maxdepth, be defined before positional options like -type.
The shell command must be in single-quotes: 'rm -r "../$1"'. If it were in double-quotes, the originating shell would substitute its value for $1, and the directory name found by find would be ignored. We need the called sh to do the substitution. The string "../$1" is in double-quotes to protect the directory name, $1, against word splitting and pathname expansion.
The shell assigns the string Rm to $0. This is unused unless there is an error message. Consequently, any string could be used.
$0, such as find-rm which is descriptive of what you are running. Otherwise, perfect answer.
busybox find does accept CMD {} (except that find fails if the CMD fails). The command was failing because you executed it inside Android, and in there, the files you were trying to erase didn't exist.
-maxdepth 1 can eliminate the need to stat things — and I know that, because it is an option (rather than a test), putting it at the beginning of the expression is recommended. But how is the order relevant? First of all, the options affect all tests, including tests specified before the option. And secondly, the -type d test forces you to stat every directory entry in . anyway.
With zsh:
cd /home/michal &&
rm -rf -- Music/*(/D:t)
The / glob qualifier is to select only directories, D to include hidden ones, and the :t modifier like in history expansion is to select only the tail (the file name without its directory part).
With any Bourne-like shell:
cd /home/michal/Music &&
set -- */ &&
cd .. &&
rm -rf -- "$@"
One difference with the above though is that it will also include symlinks to directories (and would remove the content of target instead of the link itself).
for f in */; do rm -r ../"$f" ; donefind(link tobusybox) is less robust than GNUfind, and doesn’t accept all the commands that GNUfindaccepts. … (Cont’d)-exec cmd {} \;works; it’s a question of whether-exec cmd ../{} \;works.