[colug-432] help with a command

[Rick Hornsby]

On Aug 10, 2014, at 21:20, Stephen Potter <spp at unixsa.net> wrote:

> On 8/10/2014 10:16 PM, Chris Embree wrote:
>> I guess I misread your requirements.   I think Pat had the right
>> solution for deleting dirs.
>> 
>> The only difference might be addring -rf...
>> 
>> find /dir/to/serach -type d -name "*.PA" -exec rm -rf {} \;
>> 
>> Untested.  But seems the right direction.
> 
> No, Keith said he wanted to keep the directories and only delete the 
> files within.

Right.  Also turned out that the directories are named '*.PA’ and the files are randomly named.

find . -type f -mindepth 2 -delete

One way to test away from your spool directory -

$ mkdir /tmp/findtest; cd /tmp/findtest
$ mkdir 1.PA 2.PA 3.PA
$ touch ./foo 1.PA/foo 2.PA/foo 3.PA/foo

which gives you

$ ls -lR
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  3 rhornsby  staff  102 Aug 10 22:32 1.PA
drwxr-xr-x  3 rhornsby  staff  102 Aug 10 22:32 2.PA
drwxr-xr-x  3 rhornsby  staff  102 Aug 10 22:32 3.PA
-rw-r--r--  1 rhornsby  staff    0 Aug 10 22:32 foo     ### file in current directory that we won’t touch

./1.PA:
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 rhornsby  staff  0 Aug 10 22:32 foo

./2.PA:
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 rhornsby  staff  0 Aug 10 22:32 foo

Now you can run the find command to make sure it worked:

$ find . -type f -mindepth 2
./1.PA/foo
./2.PA/foo
./3.PA/foo