Ubuntu – How to delete specific files from terminal

command linedelete

Recently, I converted my music files to a different format. I have for example a folder of an artist containing the different albums in separate folders. I would knowing if is there a way to delete *.mp3 files in all my album folders of an artist using a simple command? For example, if I use ~music/artist_a/album1$rm *.mp3 it delete all the mp3 files of only the folder album1, but I want to use a command that delete all the mp3's of album1, album2,… in the artist_a folder.

Thanks!

Best Answer

If you go one level up, you can do:

~music/artist_a/album1$ cd ..
~music/artist_a$ rm */*.mp3

to delete mp3s from every directory inside the current. If you want to delete only from specific subdirectories:

~music/artist_a$ rm {album1,album2,album4}/*.mp3

You can also use find to delete all mp3 in subfolders of every level

~music/artist_a$ find . -iname '*.mp3' -delete

Use these command with caution.

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Ubuntu – How to change the Creation/Mod Date of all folders on a USB drive using Touch command

If you have a lot of files to touch, it's just going to take a while. You can plug-in the drive, and in a terminal, assuming your drive is mounted as /media/USB_DISK, do the following:

for i in `find /media/USB_DISK -type d|sed -e 's/ /%20/g'|sort`; do
   echo $i|sed -e 's/%20/\\ /g'|xargs touch
done

Just replace the USB_DISK with the proper name of the folder where your drive is mounted under the /media/ directory.

Ubuntu – Delete multiple files with regex

Try find command with its -regex switch or -iregex (case insensitive), change your regex to .*__[a-zA-z0-9_]*\.(png|jpg|jpeg) and use the -delete option to delete the matched file:

find . -type f -regextype "posix-egrep" -iregex '.*__[a-zA-z0-9_]*\.(png|jpg|jpeg)$'

You can use other types of -regextype (which is worked) in place of "posix-egrep" like:
"posix-extended" or "posix-awk".

-regex pattern
    File  name matches regular expression pattern.  This is a match on the whole path, not a search.  For
    example, to match a file named './fubar3', you can use the regular expression '.*bar.'  or '.*b.*3',
    but not 'f.*r3'. The regular expressions understood by find are by default Emacs Regular Expres‐
    sions, but this can be changed with the -regextype option.

-iregex pattern
    Like -regex, but the match is case insensitive.

-regextype type
    Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex and -iregex tests which occur later on the
    command line. Currently-implemented types are emacs (this is the default), posix-awk, posix-basic,
    posix-egrep and posix-extended.

-delete
    Delete files

At the end add -delete switch to command to deleting matched files:

find . -type f -regextype "posix-egrep" -iregex '.*__[a-zA-z0-9_]*\.(png|jpg|jpeg)$' -delete

.*__[a-zA-z0-9_]*\.(png|jpg|jpeg)

The .* matches everything before __
The __ matches double underscores.
The [a-zA-z0-9_]* matches all alphanumeric and a single underscore _ characters. The * means this class of characters can be zero length.
The \. matches a single dot. To match a dot (.) literally you need to escape it within the regular expression using a backslash; without escaping, it matches any single character.
In the (png|jpg|jpeg), pair of parentheses makes it as a group of matches. Will match png or (|) jpg or jpeg.
The $ anchor, matches the end of string (or file names in this case)

Regular expression visualization

Debuggex Demo and test on files

Best Answer

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