Why doesn't my 'find' work like I expect using -exec?

Question

I'm trying to remove all the .svn directories from a working directory.

I thought I would just use find and rm like this:

find . -iname .svn -exec 'rm -rf {}' \;

But the result is:

find: rm -rf ./src/.svn: No such file or directory

Obviously the file exists, or find wouldn't find it... What am I missing?

Answer 1

You shouldn't put the rm -rf {} in single quotes.

As you've quoted it the shell is treating all of the arguments to -exec it as a command rather than a command plus arguments, so it's looking for a file called "rm -rf ./src/.svn" and not finding it.

Try:

find . -iname .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

Answer 2

You can also use the svn command as follows:

svn export <url-to-repo> <dest-path>

Look here for more info.

Answer 3

Try

find . -iname .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

and that probably ought to work IIRC.

Answer 4

Just by-the-bye, you should probably get out of the habit of using -exec for things that can be done to multiple files at once. For instance, I would write that out of habit as

find . -iname .svn -print | xargs rm -rf

or, since I'm now using a Macintosh and more likely to encounter file or directory names with spaces in them

find . -iname .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

"xargs" makes sure that "rm" is invoked only once every "N" files, where "N" is usually 20. That's not a huge win in this case, because rm is small, but if the program you wanted to execute on every file was large or did a lot of processing on start up, it could make things a lot faster.