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Accepted
Tigull
Asked: 2012-02-17 10:14:43 +0800 CST

How to delete all the files with a certain extension from a folder and all of its subfolders? [duplicate]

  • 772

I want to remove all the .jpg files from my Music folder in order to save room. My Music folder contains subfolders, and I would like to know if there is a command to remove all the .jpg files from all these folders regardless of their level. Thanks for your help!

file-format delete folder

4 Answers

  1. A quick and clean solution for the command line would be

    cd <dir>
find . -type f -iname \*.jpg -delete
    • . tells to start searching in the current folder.
    • -type f tells find only to look for files.
    • -iname makes the search case insensitive.
    • -delete tells find to delete/remove all files found.

    CAUTION! I recommend running the command without -delete first to get a list of the files that will be removed when -delete is included in the command. This way a small typo won't delete anything you didn't intend to.

    For more information on how to use find and what it can do see man find

    Note that find will not produce any output when -delete is used.

    Regarding the comment on multiple extensions

    find . -type f \( -name \*jpg -o -name \*png \) -delete

    • ( .. ) Group expression. Needs to be escaped from the shell, hence \( .. \) in the example
    • -o logical or

    So the above example will match any file which has either jpg or png at the end of it's name. More extensions can be added in the same way. Just make sure to remember -o between every -name statement, if -o is not specified find will default to -a (and) which won't work since a file can't end in both jpg and png at the same time.

    • 88

  2. This should do it

    sudo rm -rf -d ~/Music/*.JPG

    which will remove all .JPG files within the Music folder.

    • 10
  3. Best Answer

    The easiest way (if you are using Ubuntu Desktop):

    Go to your Music folder in Nautilus, press Ctrl+F and search for .jpg.

    enter image description here & then delete it

    You can also change the location and you can make your search more specific.

    enter image description here

    Updated

    Be More specific after searching .jpg Clicking on green button Select File type Picture & then remove jpg from search only . dot & then reload as shown in pic below

    What it does it will search Picture file like .jpg .png .gif & all other file which are in Picture Format

    enter image description here

    • 10

  4. Bash's shopt -s globstar can be useful here for recursive globbing:

    bash-4.3$ tree
.
├── 10.jpg
└── subfolder
    ├── 5.jpg
    └── another_subfolder
        └── 15.jpg

2 directories, 3 files
bash-4.3$ shopt -s globstar
bash-4.3$ rm ./**/*.jpg
bash-4.3$ tree
.
└── subfolder
    └── another_subfolder
    • 1