Tricky Deleting

[Eric Jensen]

Nicholas Leippe wrote:

>On Tuesday 08 March 2005 05:16 pm, Eric Jensen wrote:
>  
>
>>Working with a new backup scheme and trying to think of a good way to
>>delete all sub folders of a directory, but not any files in the root of
>>the directory.  For example, I have a directory structure like:
>>/2005/03/08.  Folder '03' has a folder for every single day with the
>>daily backups.  At the end of the month I am moving the last day's
>>backups to the root of the month's folder (03) and then want to clear
>>out all the daily folders.  I could just copy them to a temporary
>>folder, do the traditional rm -rf and move the files back.  But curious
>>to know if there is a handier way to do this, since I'm sure it will
>>come up again.
>>    
>>
>
>find /2005/03/ -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs rm -rf
>
>  
>
Close, tried that already but the problem is it finds /2005/03/ and 
performs rm -rf on it as well.  I am trying to play with expressions so 
I can do something like !/2005/03/ but I am new to find and not doing to 
hot on syntax.

Hmm... Just changed /2005/03/* and that seemed to work better.  Quick 
question, what is the difference of doing something like:

`find stuff | rm -rf ` and `find stuff | xargs rm -rf `?

Some day this find stuff will stick around in my brain long enough for 
me to stop asking questions like this here.  man find just ends up 
confusing me even more. ;)  Thanks again.

Eric Jensen