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Using pipes to delete all occurences of Thumbs.db file from Ubuntu Laptop

Answer 1

+1 A:

You may want try:

find /mnt/something -iname 'thumbs.db' -exec rm -v {} \;

or if you really want use pipe you may want try

find /mnt/something -iname 'thumbs.db' | xargs rm -v

-iname will search for 'Thumbs.db' and 'thumbs.db'. Check man for more info.

change /mnt/something for your path.

Edit:

I think you can also try it:

find /mnt/someting -iname 'thumbs.db' | while read junk; do rm -v "$junk"; done

It should work with dirs what contain space in name etc.

Piotr Karbowski 2010-09-11 19:18:12

One problem with the above is that say I have a directory "New Directory" which have Thumbs.db file. When I issue the above command it tries to delete Thumbs.db from "New" and "Directory" directories which doesn't exist on my computer.

abhishekgupta92 2010-09-11 21:40:37

Thats where pipe and xargs sucks, if you will use the one with -exec it will work as you want.

Piotr Karbowski 2010-09-11 22:21:38

find and xargs don't suck. Just use `find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...`. This uses null characters to separate the filename, so spaces are no longer special.

Ryan Thompson 2010-09-11 22:38:37

@Ryan can you please elaboarate more on its usage or edit the code of Piotr to meet the requirement

abhishekgupta92 2010-10-06 20:55:34

`find /mnt/something -iname 'thumbs.db' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v`

Ryan Thompson 2010-10-07 02:54:10

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Using pipes to delete all occurences of Thumbs.db file from Ubuntu Laptop

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