Bashscripts.org

Hi Everyone,

I'm a newbie.

I usually issue this command to find and delete mp3 files in home directory.

find /home -iname '*.mp3' -exec rm -f {} \;

How can I make a bash script to find and delete all kinds of media files such as mp3, wma, mpg, etc.

Thanks a lot!

This is a really simplistic solution.
Save it as script.sh and make it executeable, chmod +x script.sh.
To use it do something like this:
./script.sh mp3 mpg wma

This will execute 3 finds that can be translated like this.
find /home -iname '*.mp3' -exec rm -f {} \;
find /home -iname '*.mpg' -exec rm -f {} \;
find /home -iname '*.wma' -exec rm -f {} \;

This happens because 'for' shifts each word seperated by a whitespace character (in this case it's a space) and sets $ext to the current itteration.
$* is just a way to print all arguments passed from the command line.
The $array variable will look like this:


Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

Hi,

I made some modifications.

I created a flat text file named file.txt and I put inside that text file all the file extensions of the media files that I wanted to delete.

Here is the script:


What I want to add next is how to make the script ignore some specific files / folders inside the /path-to-folder folder

Thanks!

That is abit trickier. AFAIK find doesn't support excludes right out of the box.

This is a method google proposed to use.


You can find more info at this url:
http://www.liamdelahunty.com/tips/linux ... tories.php

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

Hi fredrik,

Thank you for your help.

Just wanted to share the final script I used for the benefit of others who are also encountering the same problem:



Basically, the script will find and delete all the files with the same file extensions listed in the file.txt located inside the "/path-to-folder" folder excluding media, images, and backups folder.