Linux – deleting folders in linux bash

Try

find /srv/www/*/htdocs/system/application/ -name "*.php" -exec grep "debug (" {} \; -print

This should recursively search the folders under application for files with .php extension and pass them to grep.

An optimization on this would be to execute:

find /srv/www/*/htdocs/system/application/ -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -H "debug ("

This uses xargs to pass all the .php files output by find as arguments to a single grep command; e.g., grep "debug (" file1 file2 file3. The -print0 option of find and -0 option of xargs ensure the spaces in file and directory names are correctly handled. The -H option passed to grep ensures that the filename is printed in all situations. (By default, grep prints the filename only when multiple arguments are passed in.)

From man xargs:

-0

Input items are terminated by a null character instead of by whitespace, and the quotes and backslash are not special (every character is taken literally).  Disables the end of file string, which is treated like any other argument.  Useful when input items might contain white space, quote marks, or backslashes.  The GNU find -print0 option produces input suitable for this mode.

If you can, you can off course first remove all .svn folders. Downside: you'll lose version control information, if someone is using SVN. If someone is using SVN, then it's not good idea to just remove those folders (or actually you have to remove those from SVN too, as SVN is tracking folders and files).

If that's not possible, I would go with scripting route:

for folder in $(find . -type d); do
 if [ "`ls $folder | wc -l`" -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "I am going to delete $folder"
 fi
done

First try test-run, because there might be something surprising. Then you can change rm -r instead of that echo.

Note however, this will remove all folders with only dot-files (so for example a/.this_is_super_important will be deleted, if there is no other files or folders).