Ubuntu – How to delete files of certain extension that don’t have a given string in their filename

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I have a directory with files of many extensions in it. I would like to recursively delete *.srt files (and *.srt files only) which don't end with -en.srt (where srt is an extension). I've come up with the following solution and it seems to work fine, however, I'd like to know whether it is 100% correct.

find . -name "*.srt" ! -name "*-en.srt" -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;

Best Answer

! -- First read the answer completely then use it if you like it -- !

Your command is correct, however there is no need to use -rf as rm parameters. because you are removing files and not directories.

Another clear way to write it is (it's almost same as your command):

find -name '*.srt' -and -not -name '*-en.srt' -type f -exec rm '{}' \;

or as @steeldriver suggested you can use:

find -name '*.srt' -and -not -name '*-en.srt' -type f -ok rm '{}' \;

It will ask for your permission to remove each founded file.

You can also use -delete instead of rm {} \; however be aware of its dangers:

Don't forget that the find command line is evaluated as an expres‐ sion, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified. When testing a find command line that you later intend to use with -delete, you should explicitly specify -depth in order to avoid later surprises. Because -delete implies -depth, you cannot usefully use -prune and -delete together.

It is always a good idea to test what is going to happen before doing the actual job, so I suggest running:

find -name '*.srt' -and -not -name '*-en.srt' -type f | grep -i en.srt

If it return nothing then the actual command will work without any problem and you are good to go... or even:

find -name '*.srt' -and -not -name '*-en.srt' -type f | less

to check what's going to be removed.

And do not forget to quote '{}':

(when find is being invoked from a shell) it should be quoted (for example, '{}') to protect it from interpretation by shells.

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Ubuntu – EOG (Image Viewer) fails to open gif files with incorrect png extension – how can I solve this

If you use (from command line or within a script... if you need the script just ask ;) ) the command file thisimage.png, it will tell you what image format you actually have.... Then you can rename accordingly...

This is a sample of what I get with a file with incorrect file extension .png which is really a jpg file:

user@computer:$ file logo.png
logo.png: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01

Edit: Oh, ok, I was lazy before... Here's an script that will rename actual gif files that are named with .png extension to their correct extension .gif:

#!/bin/bash
for NAME in $(ls *.png); do

if [ "$(file $NAME|grep GIF)" ]; then

echo "Renaming ${NAME} to ${NAME%.*}.gif"
mv ${NAME} ${NAME%.*}.gif

fi

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Ubuntu – Copying certain files by partially matching their names to a list within a text file

Iterate over the lines with _ as the IFS, get the desired first portion containing digits, and the copy the files starting with those digits:

shopt -s nullglob
while IFS=_ read -r i _; do [[ $i =~ ^[0-9]{5}$ ]] && echo cp -it dest/ "${i}"*; done <file.txt

Expanded:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob  ##Expands to null string if no match while doing glob expansion,
                   ##rather than the literal
while IFS=_ read -r i _; do  ##Iterate over the lines of file.txt, 
                              ##with `_` as the `IFS` i.e. word splitting 
                              ##happens on each `_` only, variable `i` 
                              ##will contain the digits at start; `_` is a
                              ##throwaway variable containing the rest
    [[ $i =~ ^[0-9]{5}$ ]] \ ##Check if the variable contains only 5 digits
      && echo cp -it /destination/ "${i}"*  ##if so, copy the relevant files starting with those digits
done <file.txt

Replace file.txt with the actual source file, and /destination/ with your actual destination directory. Here echo is included to do the dry-run; if satisfied with the commands to be run, just get rid of echo:

shopt -s nullglob
while IFS=_ read -r i _; do [[ $i =~ ^[0-9]{5}$ ]] && cp -it dest/ "${i}"*; done <file.txt

Best Answer

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