[SOLVED] Deleting all files with a certain file extension

[saj0577]

1.) Deletes all files that are not .mp3 inside a folder(searches inside all sub-folders)
2.) Deletes any empty directories (not essential)



Short and sweet.Any solution to that would be great.
Thanks in advance
Saj

[Sarmacid]

Not sure about the mp3s, guess you'd have to play around with find. For more details run

man find

As for the empty folders

find <path> -empty -type d -exec rm -r '{}' \;

When I tried it, it was returning some errors, but worked anyways

[Sub101]

EDIT: Sorry just re read what you said. Anything thats NOT an MP3. My post will remove all mp3's.

Not tested but something like:

cd {folder of choice}
rm *.mp3

That should work. Just be very careful with the rm command.
I just tried it with a made up extension of .abc on my desktop and it worked fine.

[Sub101]

I assume there is not a great deal of file extensions in your folder could you not remove each extension one at a time? And to include sub-folders the -r option would work.

[Idefix82]

For 1. I think this should work (just tested it):

rm -r *[^.mp3]

By popular demand:
edit: be warned that this command will do what the original poster wanted it to do - delete all files which don't end with ".mp3" from the active folder and all subfolders.

[randy78]

For 1. I think this should work (just tested it):

rm -r *[^.mp3]

Just BE SURE that you're in the directory where the files and folders are located that you want to remove...

Otherwise, this could be disastrous.

[Idefix82]

Obviously.

[randy78]

Obviously.

Yeah, obviously... but what if this person is a brand new user?
How obvious would it be to them then?

Take Care

[fenian]

Here is a another way to do it,2 more steps but gives you more of an idea of what you are actually deleting...

Open a terminal and cd into the directory with your mp3 files (I'll use $HOME/music as an example)

cd $HOME/music

next run...

find . \( \! -name "*\.mp3" -type f \) -print0

(should list all the files that are not .mp3)

next run...

find . \( \! -name "*\.mp3" -type f \) -print0 | xargs -0 echo

If the files listed are what you want gone go ahead and run...

find . \( \! -name "*\.mp3" -type f \) -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

Files should be gone and you may have a little more assurance that nothing you wanted was deleted by mistake.

[Idefix82]

Yeah, obviously... but what if this person is a brand new user?
How obvious would it be to them then?

Take Care

Relax. It was pretty clear to me that a person with twice as many posts as me and advertising himself as Beta-tester in the signature is not a brand new user.
I really don't understand why you are having a go at me for answering his question. I am sure that it was clear to him that deleting recursively all files which do not satisfy some criterion can be dangerous if you are careless. Nobody on these forums has lost any files he didn't want to lose because of me and I have helped a fair few people, among other things to get rid of things they didn't want.

Next time, just read the posts properly.