Ubuntu :: Rm Directories Only - Not Files - When Doing Rm -r Foo*
Feb 28, 2011
How do I delete just directories and not files when performing a "rm -r foo*" command? E.G. I have foobar.txt foofoo.o foorebar.jpg and foo/ foonuggets/ and footemp/ in a directory. In one fell swoop how do I delete just the directories and preserve the files?
Seeing as how I only use the -r switch when removing directories I accidentally ran this command and removed files that I wanted (luckily nothing vital). Lesson learned now I want to prevent ever doing that on files that *are* vital.
i am in need of linux help. iam at college and i need this back/restore script to pass this final part of an assessment. i require a backup script that will not only backup but also restore files to the relevent directories. e.g. users are instructed to store all wordprocessor files in a directory named wp. so i am needing to create a backup directory and 3 directories within that and some files within the 3 directories and then back them up ot restore them. l know i should/have to do this myself by been trying to get/understand info for the last few days and came up with zero.
I am writing a script, in that my requirement is, if all the fill types stored in one directory from that we need to separate different different directories based on the file types.
for example in a directory(anish). 5 different types files 1- directory 2- .txt files 2- .sh files
like that and my requirement is the (1- directory is moved to one new directory(dir) which we are given in the script)and (2 .txt files are moved to another new directory(test) which we are given in the script)and ( 2 .sh files are moved to another new directory(bash) which we are given in the scrip)finally the directory anish should be empty..using bash script.how it is possible !!
I need a script that will take all the files in a given directory and create new monthly sub-directories and sort all the files based on the creation date into the appropriate directory.For example, all files created between 01/01/09 and 01/31/09 will be placed in 'JAN-2009'
I want to copy all directories, files, and hidden files and hidden directories with one command. I want these items to replace any same items in the target directory.
I have tried several things, such as:
cp -r * cp -aR *
but I only seem to get visible files and directories. Obviously, I am missing something. (A brain, probably....)
I downloaded some backgrounds from Gnome Art and am having trouble moving them to the backgrounds folder. I've been trying this: sudo mv desktop <filename> usr/share/backgrounds.I moved to the desktop to make it easier.
I have a directory tree with lots of folders. I need to gather all files of same type, say .txt, and place them in a different folder all by themselves.
I know I can use the mv command, but it won't let me go through all the subdirectories of my folder, just the current one. How can I search through all subdirectories for all .txts or whatever and move them to a folder of my choosing?
I am trying to copy the files from my WHS disk to my Ubuntu Server disk. I have the windows disk mounted at /media/WINDOWS and I want to transfer to /storage so I ran;Code:sudo cp -r /media/WINDOWS /storageIt takes about 4-5 seconds and is complete, but there is about 500 GB worth of data there so I know it didn't really copy everything over. When I look at the files in console it shows them, but when I look at the /storage through SAMBA on my Windows machine, it only shows the directories.?
This is the second time it happens : I have some files/directories that have disappeared.The first time was:
- /home/$USER/.vimrc - /home/$USER/.thunderbird
And now, it's my folder:
/home/$USER/document
which was more important. Is there any known issue about that ? I have sometimes a file system scan when I startup my computer. Is there a relationship by any chance ?
I have about 50GB of .MOD video files that I need to compress to a smaller format. The only problem is that there are many files (30 second to 5 minute clips) spread out across several directories. I was wondering if anyone knew of a tool that will recursively search the directories and batch convert all of the files? I'm open to anything including a good script for mencoder or ffmpeg.
When I am in Nautilus, I want to be able to select a directory, then right click (or some other action) to do a file find on that directory. The gnome-search-tool would be a good candidate for this, if it could be an action in Nautilus. I know I can do a file find through other means, but Nautilus seems to be where I am when I want to search directories.
what i wanted to do was find all the files with a specific name from a tree, sort them by modification time and have their directory appended to them so that i knew where they were (because they all have the same name). i tried a whole bunch of different things and finally did this:
this did the trick pretty well, but as you can see it is far from elegant and i think i'm doing some things wrong and kludgy
first thing i tried was "ls -lRt | grep world.sav" which worked except i couldnt distinguish the files because there were no directories. that took a lot of looking till i accepted i couldnt make ls print directories as well and append them to the files somehow that their relationship would be clear. i tried piping ls to find, doing it in reverse, passing them from grep etc. etc. until i read some more stuff online that got me using gawk and sort. the questions:
1. is there some other, more elegant and simple way to do this kind of detection and sorting?
2. is there any way to use a pipe after using exec? the semicolon seems to prevent this entirely, forcing me to use an intermediate file as above. i could just remove it later, but i'd prefer a straight piping.
I am trying to copy my /home directory to a separate partition. I have seen a lot of info on this on the internet. Most of the information uses cpio to copy the files. The destination partition has been successfukky mounter.
I used about all available OS 's. In all systems I used a quick acces system like the file browser applet in Ubuntu. In fact I "cannot live without", specially if I am working on jobs and I have to work with a lot of files in different directories. Opening lots of folders and endless clicking is really not an option to me. Does anyone know if there is such an applet or possibility in Unity (because gnome 2 applets will not work in Natty)?
I am a pretty new user to linux, I am trying to run a program called car whisperer. The file can be downloaded here trifinite site - the home of the trifinite.group the readme says to install just type $make #make install but this does nothing and I am not sure how to install it. There is a file called makefile which I try to run in terminal but it just gives me all sorts of errors about not being able to find files and directories. I have seen it run and the person simply types ./carwhisperer to run the program but I also get no directory or file here as well (probably cause I have not installed). I was able to install some programs using sudo apt-get install (filename) but I haven't found this command to work for this program.
I recently deleted some files. I would like to know are the files kept in a directory? Like in windows recycle bin. I would like to know where these files are?
I'm totally new to Linux and this website. I was wondering if anyone had or could help me create a shell script that would merge two files from two different directories and then have that new merged file in a third differnt directory.The merged file would need to eliminate duplicates and sort the contents.
I'd like to remove all directories of a certain depth that don't contain .txt or .log files -- is this possible? So far I have: find ~ -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 4 -type d -exec rm -r '{}' ; Is it possible to add in "only if the directory doesn't contain .txt and/or .log files"? Or do I have to start learning perl to do that?
For example: dir 1: hello.txt runme.sh dir 2: runme.sh oct12.log [Code]....
If I execute the following command: cp -R /myfiles /mydestination
If myfiles contains several sub-directories and files, in what order will they be copied? For example, directories might be named 0123a, 9993c, myfolder, xfolder.
They are not copied in alphabetical order OR in date order OR in the order they appear when using a standard ls command as far as I can tell, so what actually does determine the order?
Edit: I am trying to determine the order that the cp command uses in order to determine how far along my copy command made it before it stopped. For example, I was hoping to be able to determine it copied 3 of the 4 directories successfully.
The rm command man pages discusses removing files or directories recursively. So what is meant by deleting a file or directory recursively? And what are some reasons for doing so?
I have been searching for a solution to the following problem:
When my distro of choice updates Firefox web browser, the directory name is '/usr/lib/firefox-<version>'. The problem here is that the directory name is dynamic by nature and doesn't allow a simple static solution, e.g. 'cp -rf /usr/local/files/bookmarks.html /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/profile'.
The same quandary applies when adding extensions, changing prefs etc. I have looked at the following commands:- find, sed, xargs, grep, awk, fprint. Unfortunately my grasp of syntax and programming is very simple at best.
I have to write a script that accepts two directory names (JIIT, JUIT) as positional parameters and checks which files are identical in both directories and files having same contents are also considered as identical in same directory. I tried using diff:
#both directories contain three files...file1, file2, file3 echo "Enter the directories:" read d1 read d2 cd $d1
if diff file1.sh file2.sh > /dev/null then echo same 1,2 else echo different fi
if diff file1.sh file3.sh > /dev/null then echo same 1,3 else echo different fi
if diff file2.sh file3.sh > /dev/null then echo same 3,2 else echo different fi
cd ../ cd $d2 .....
I used the same code in the other directory for the three files. This is not running. I also want to know what to do when I need to compare files from different directories. i.e., JIIT, JUIT..
I then installed a new version of Ubuntu 10.04 from disk and copied the files in /home from the cd to the hard. I am able to open, view etc. all the files in most directories except those in /home/documents. There are text files created by gedit, OOWP and several PDF files. I cannot open or view these files, depending: gedit and pdf files gets a Err.Msg. "Don't recognize file type" (it is clearly marked PDF) . The OO files look like rows of 'high bits' and a dialogue box opens giving me the options to change Char. Set, Font, Language, Paragraph break.
I have 60+ directory's each containing multiple .doc files. I need to move them to a single directory and keep their file name intact. I don't think cp will do that with out listing all the file names. I was thinking of something like: cp -r /dir/*.doc /newdir . Or should I use a combo like find -type *.doc|cp /newdir?