Ubuntu – How to detect files with the same name but different extensions

batchdeletedirectory

I have a directory whose files have extension either .JPG or .NEF and I want to delete the files of the form X.NEF for which X.JPG does not exist in the directory. (X here can be any string.) I don't know how to do this other than by hand.

A more general situation is when you want to find all the files in a directory A which exist in directory B as well. (The first problem can be turned into the second one using mmv.)

Best Answer

You can use the shell's ${var%ext} parameter substitution features to remove the original extension on a per-file basis: to illustrate

touch file{1..6}.NEF file{1,2,4,6}.JPG

Then

for nef in *.NEF; do [[ -f "${nef%.NEF}.JPG" ]] || echo rm -- "$nef"; done

results in

rm -- file3.NEF
rm -- file5.NEF

Explanation:

The first command just creates 6 .NEF files numbered file1.NEF to file6.NEF and corresponding .JPG files for 3 of them i.e. just some empty files to test the second command on.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Find and exec in found folder

You were right in considering -execdir. Something simple like the below should work

find testfolder/ -name '*.nef' -execdir mkdir -p NEF \; -execdir mv {} NEF/ \;

Delete First-Level Subfolders Without Specific String

Let us say you want to start find in the current directory, and restrict it to the first level of subdirectories:

find . -maxdepth 1

The find command has a useful flag -not (or !) which negates the following test. So in order to find a name which does not contain a substring, add

-not -name "*substring*"

IMPORTANT: you will want to exclude the current directory itself as well. Otherwise, the whole current directory would be deleted.

-not -name "."

Then you want to test for directories only:

-type d

And, if everything looks good, you want to delete these directories:

-exec rm -rf {} \;

which says "for all found directories, execute this command". The {} is a placeholder for the name of the directory (including the full path, so it works on the correct one). \; indicates the end of the command to be executed.

Summarizing:

find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name "*substring*" -not -name "." -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

should work. But first, try it out without the -exec part.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Find and exec in found folder

Delete First-Level Subfolders Without Specific String

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