linux - How can I use the find command to remove directories without eliminating certain subdirectories?

I am trying to modify the following command in a script that removes directories based on age.

Example directories would be the following:

/a/b/c/2011/11/11
/a/b/c/2011/11/11/12-ACD-1234
/a/b/c/2011/11/14

The current inaccurate attempt is the following:

find /a/b -type d -mindepth 2 -depth ! -name '*ACD*' -mtime +180 -exec rm -rf {} +

Although this script will not remove directories containing "ACD", the parent directory will be removed. I have tried -prune combinations and other tricks but am unable to get the desired result.

Is there a way to hone this find command to preserve subdirectories matching certain criteria? In this example, the parent directories /a/b/c/2011 and /a/b/c/2011/11 would have to be preserved as to not recursively remove the subdirectory.

I am looking to do this with just a find command, if at all possible. Thanks.

The chief issue is that find gives you a lovely list of directories as output, but you need a way to evaluate each of those on their own to determine whether they have an *ACD* somewhere in a subdirectory. And piped commands don't seem to work well (or at all?) as an argument to find's -exec.

So one approach would be to create your own command script that -exec can call, which will return 0 if its argument contains no subdirectory *ACD*, and 1 otherwise. This seems to work for me:

#!/bin/sh
# script: /path/to/hasnoACD
list=`find $1 -name '*ACD*'`
[ "x$list" = "x" ] && exit 0 || exit 1

Then your desired find command just uses -exec twice:

find /a/b -type d -mindepth 2 -depth ! -name '*ACD*' -mtime +180 -exec /path/to/hasnoACD {} \;  -exec rm -rf {} +

-exec /path/to/hasnoACD {} \; will evaluate as true only for the cases you want.

Another alternative: I initially approached this in a way similar to @icyrock-com, in that I ended up with a find command piped to a while loop, which handles the directory removals. The 'while' syntax will depend on your shell, and you'll need a way to distinguish directories that contain some *ACD* subdirectory as we did above with the hasnoACD script, but in bash on FreeBSD the following seems to work:

find /a/b -type d -mindepth 2 -depth ! -name '*ACD*' -mtime +180 | while read mydir ; do find $mydir -name '*ACD*' | xargs false && rm -rf $mydir ; done

Note the find within the while loop -- only when that find returns nothing (no *ACD* subdirs) will xargs return true, so that the rm -rf $mydir is executed. This behavior of xargs works on my FreeBSD machine, but on Linux or Solaris the behavior is different, so some other test would be needed.

As @icyrock-com suggests, you may wish to do a mv rather than a rm, just to be safe.

Not sure you can do this with find only, but here's a test script you can try - try this in /tmp or somewhere safe:

# Prepare
rm -rf a
mkdir -p a/b/c
for a in c d; do
  for i in 2010 2011; do
    for j in 05 11; do
      mkdir -p a/b/$a/$i/$j/will-delete
      if [ $j != 05 ]; then
        mkdir -p a/b/$a/$i/$j/will-ACD-leave
      fi
    done
  done
done
echo Created

# List
echo ----- Listing
find a

# Remove
echo ----- Removing
find a/b -depth -type d ! -name "*ACD*"|while read l; do
  num_entries=`ls -a "$l"|wc -l`
  if [ $num_entries -eq 2 ]; then
    echo Removing $l
    rm -rf "$l"
  fi
done

# List
echo ----- Listing
find a

Note the above removes the -mtime +180 for testing, so you need to adjust as needed. The output would be this:

Created
----- Listing
a
a/b
a/b/c
a/b/c/2010
a/b/c/2010/05
a/b/c/2010/05/will-delete
a/b/c/2010/11
a/b/c/2010/11/will-delete
a/b/c/2010/11/will-ACD-leave
a/b/c/2011
a/b/c/2011/05
a/b/c/2011/05/will-delete
a/b/c/2011/11
a/b/c/2011/11/will-delete
a/b/c/2011/11/will-ACD-leave
a/b/d
a/b/d/2010
a/b/d/2010/05
a/b/d/2010/05/will-delete
a/b/d/2010/11
a/b/d/2010/11/will-delete
a/b/d/2010/11/will-ACD-leave
a/b/d/2011
a/b/d/2011/05
a/b/d/2011/05/will-delete
a/b/d/2011/11
a/b/d/2011/11/will-delete
a/b/d/2011/11/will-ACD-leave
----- Removing
Removing a/b/c/2010/05/will-delete
Removing a/b/c/2010/05
Removing a/b/c/2010/11/will-delete
Removing a/b/c/2011/05/will-delete
Removing a/b/c/2011/05
Removing a/b/c/2011/11/will-delete
Removing a/b/d/2010/05/will-delete
Removing a/b/d/2010/05
Removing a/b/d/2010/11/will-delete
Removing a/b/d/2011/05/will-delete
Removing a/b/d/2011/05
Removing a/b/d/2011/11/will-delete
----- Listing
a
a/b
a/b/c
a/b/c/2010
a/b/c/2010/11
a/b/c/2010/11/will-ACD-leave
a/b/c/2011
a/b/c/2011/11
a/b/c/2011/11/will-ACD-leave
a/b/d
a/b/d/2010
a/b/d/2010/11
a/b/d/2010/11/will-ACD-leave
a/b/d/2011
a/b/d/2011/11
a/b/d/2011/11/will-ACD-leave

The above will delete empty parent folders, so if that's the problem, you may want to modify the while loop to just make a dummy file after each rm and then do another top-level find to delete these (name them in some way for easier finding).

As a separate note - instead of delete, I suggest doing a mv somewhere instead until you are sure this is what you want. Backing up before is another option.

Hope this helps.