Hello all,

First of all I'm a Linux newbie (at much) so be gentle please... :P

I've been able to see that the version control software that the people on the design department is generating a special folder named OBSOLETE for each project.

The data Inside each of those folders is not important.

I'm trying to delete all the contents inside those folders recursively without deleting the folder itself.

Now I've been able to delete the obsolete folders, and even the help in the software tells me that doing it won't hurt the system... I would like not to do it.

Now I've used:

find . -name obsolete -exec rm -rf {} \;

The problem here is that I also remove the folder obsolete...

Does anyone know what should I write in order to remove the contents of all the obsolete folders and not the folders it selves?

Thank you in advance.

Hi,

I believe the following should do the trick:
It basically says to delete all the subdirectories and files of ./obsolete. Remove the echo when you think it gives the correct output.

Edit:
Eh, I just saw that is not what you want, obsolete may also appear somewhere in the directory structure, right? Then '*/obsolete/*' should do it, if I am not mistaken.

Edit2:
No, that won't do it either, that will also remove the whole path from your current directory to the obsolete directory. Mhh, not as simple as I thought.

Edit3:
The version from pengrath below should work, but it did not really appeal to me, so this is what I came up with instead; borrowing his approach though.
This one actually works.

Regards,
bytepool

I'm using bash:

not sure if this is the kind of thing you are looking for but perhaps try this on a test case of your own.

rm -rf `find . -name obsolete | sed s/$/\\\/*/g `

note on syntax:
`` - means execute whats inside here as if it were a command you can also use $()

*this will give you an error if there is an empty obsolete directory.
*I love regular expressions